[uf-discuss] RE: Microformats and RDFa not as far apart as previously thought

[Guillaume Lebleu]

Toby A Inkster wrote:
> Guillaume Lebleu wrote:
>
>> <span class="dstart" lang="en-us">October 5, 2004</span>
>
>
> Cognition already supports this as a last ditch attempt at parsing 
> dates - 

Thank you for the attempt.
> but I wouldn't recommend it get adopted widely. It's too unreliable; 

Why is this that requiring that English content writers (I mean only 
those don't want to use the abbr pattern) to write dates and times in 
accordance to the existing precise rules of English grammar and 
publishing style guides (ex. AP stylebook) they know about (or used to 
know about) is less reliable than asking them to write them twice, one 
in the format they like and a second time in an ISO format most of them 
likely don't know about in an relatively arcane syntax?

I think it really depends on where our priorities are as a community. If 
most hCalendar items are destined to be software-generated (including 
via, say, a TinyMCE plugin) or are added by specialized staff, after the 
content is authored, I agree with you. On the other hand, if we want 
actual content authors to be able to add this mark-up, then I think 
plain old English microformats may be more reliable, and actually more 
used in the first place, than dark data or RDFa.
> too much work to deal with internationalisation; 

I don't think we need to support all locales at once. I don't know in 
how many written languages BBC publishes in, but it might be that 
supporting en-uk and en-us might be enough for a start. Also, one can 
imagine that Microformats tools could focus on the most common written 
languages and then expose hooks for others to implement support for 
other locales.
> too much work full-stop in languages that don't provide a handy 
> library that takes care of most of the work.
>

True, but again, what are our priorities? making programmers' life 
easier or making content authors and content readers' life easier?

Anyway, there are other problems. Just trying to think outside of the class.

Guillaume