[uf-discuss] Microformat tools bogosity test

[Kevin Marks]

On Mar 6, 2007, at 7:47 AM, Christopher St John wrote:

> On 3/6/07, Kevin Marks <kevinmarks at mac.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Mar 5, 2007, at 3:31 AM, Danny Ayers wrote:
>>
>> > Thought this might be useful:
>> >
>> > http://dannyayers.com/misc/microformats/soupdragon
>>
>> http://epeus.blogspot.com/2007/03/hot-news-people-lie.html
>>
>> Or, as we say round here, 'not 80%'
>
> The 80% thing has become nearly meaningless. Except if
> you translate it into "It's not 80% of my personal use cases,
> so you shut up!", which is meaningful but useless.

Let me clarify that - Danny's 'ceci n'est pas une pipe' example is  
clearly not 80%. There is a potential danger of people  
misrepresenting things as microformats that aren't (eg spammers), but  
requiring a profile in the head won't deter them.

> You don't need to buy into a "strong semantic web" scenario
> to appreciate that some people wish to use microformats in a
> more formal way. Formality can be useful if you expect your
> data to sometimes be processed mechanically with minimal
> human intervention and don't want to be misunderstood. It's
> not nearly as useful when the data is for immediate presentation
> to a human (like screen-scraper browser plugins), but then again
> it doesn't hurt those use cases, either.
>
> Having tools and documentation for those cases seems to be
> helpful without doing any harm.

I'm all in favour of people presenting data more formally if they and  
others will find it useful. However Danny was making a straw soupdragon.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others  
to live as one wishes to live. - Oscar Wilde