[uf-discuss] generic microformat parsing heuristics?

[Danny Ayers]

On 11/9/05, Charles Iliya Krempeaux <supercanadian at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> On 11/8/05, Danny Ayers <danny.ayers at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 11/7/05, Charles Iliya Krempeaux <supercanadian at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > To do what you want, you'd need a way of "marking" every Microformat
> > > usage as being Microformat, so you could easily "lift out" all the
> > > Microformat nuggets.  For example, if you required every Microformat
> > > to use a class="microformat", then you could just lift out everything
> > > with a class="microformat" in it.  (Note though, a class could
> > > potentially have more than one thing listed in it.  For example
> > > class="microformat vcard".)
> >
> > Isn't this the purpose of the profile URI?
>
> I really don't know as much about the profile URI as I should, but my
> understanding is that the profile attribute sites on the HTML "head"
> element.  And you'd still have to know about "meaning" behind each
> different profile URI (that you are interested in), ahead of time,
> before you could use them.

I don't disagree, but would argue that there is a lot that can be
gleaned without needing the full "meaning". Most software deals with
entities and relationships between them, and microformats do carry
enough to tell what's what in this limited sense. RDF demonstrates
that this can be enough to intelligently merge and query data,
potentially from multiple sources, which is a good basis on which more
application- (or microformat-) specific functionality can be built.
(To clarify: RDF is only one way of doing this, but personally I'm way
too lazy to be interested in inventing others...).

Cheers,
Danny.

--

http://dannyayers.com