[uf-discuss] Microformat's Logos

[Ben Ward]

On 26 Sep 2006, at 01:13, Stephen Paul Weber wrote:
> Hello,
>   I was wondering if there had every been any serious thought to
> giving individual microformats logos (for widgets and buttons and
> such, etc).

I'm not sure whether it counts as serious thought, but the issue of  
icons for hCard and hCalendar came up when I published my µf UI  
mockup a few months back [1]. I took that the view that in the case  
of hC* it makes most sense for them to adopt icons akin to their  
desktop cousins: Namely contact cards and calendar appointment icons.

Generally speaking, I'm anti creating dedicated icons for  
Microformats since the whole point is not that they _are  
microformats_ the point is the _data_ and the purpose of that data.  
Take Tails as an example, rather than show the µf logo in the Firefox  
status bar, I'd rather like it to show icons related to the type of  
microformat found (again, akin to my mock-up).

hAtom? It's a feed format so should really be indicated with the  
standard feed icon (although I did once create something utterly  
different [2]).

The other formats, be they new concepts (hResume) or just never  
iconified before (xFolk) seem well worth thinking about though.

> I created an XOXO logo back when I started the XOXO Blog
> <http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6537/1341/1600/XOXObadge.png>.  An
> aquaintance recently told me that it was rather ugly and decided he
> would try his hand,

Depending on how strongly people are disliking OPML this morning  
(;-)), there is an apparent effort to create a ‘standard OPML  
icon’ [3] . If there's a need, that could possibly be persuaded into  
becoming a ‘standard outline icon’? Depending on whether they're  
prepared to open their scope at all, or whether their aim is to  
promote OPML exclusively.

> but of course any of these efforts is far from
> 'official'.

Well, I never saw if the Microformats Community accepted the idea,  
but Chris Messina has been pushing for the logo to be covered and  
protected under a ‘community mark’ concept where effectively group  
consensus determines acceptable use of the microformats logo. If  
that's actually been adopted here then I would suspect that icons for  
individual formats would be ‘official’ when taken under the same  
community protection.

Ben

[1] http://ben-ward.co.uk/journal/microformats-ui/
[2] http://flickr.com/photos/benward/106037547/
[3] http://www.opmlicons.com/