[uf-discuss] Microformats 2 status

[Tantek Çelik]

On Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 12:59 PM, Dan Brickley <danbri at danbri.org> wrote:
> Hi folks

Hi Dan, apologies for the late reply, we've been busy with a server
move (yes, the microformats server has moved to much better hosting!
more on that in a blog post), but it does seem like everything is
working properly on the new server, and as far as we can tell, aside
from a few hours of read-only time on the wiki, microformats.org was
up continuously across the transition.


> I liked the direction Microformats 2 was heading in - simpler
> conceptual model and more consistent documentation. Checking back to
> see how things are,
> http://microformats.org/wiki/index.php?title=microformats-2&action=history
> it seems that page is fairly stable lately.

Indeed, the basic structure and functionality of microformats-2 syntax
and vocabularies have been quite stable, with only minor tweaks (if
any) made in many months.


> Is that an indication of consensus that the design is more or less
> right, ... or a lack of enthusiasm in moving things in that direction?

Hopefully the former. :)

All outstanding issues that were raised have been resolved, and
various folks have started to move forward with publishing
microformats-2 markup in the wild. There's even a short section on the
wiki listing some:


http://microformats.org/wiki/microformats-2#Examples_in_the_wild


Please feel free to add your own pages/sites that are publishing microformats-2.

And if you're working on a parser, try parsing the referenced examples
and see what you get.


> If I wanted to get my hands dirty with test cases and a parser, is
> anyone working on parsing tools?

Re: test cases:

We don't have any stand-alone test-cases yet beyond what is on the
microformats-2 page itself (in terms of markup and respective JSON
output).

Do you have a preferred format for test cases?


Re: parsing tools

I know that Ben Ward is working on a javascript native microformats-2
parser, and every other existing microformats parser is in various
states of progress to adding microformats-2 support, sometimes in the
same time as HTML5 <time> and <data> support as well.

Since microformats-2 parsing support is drastically simpler than
current microformats, I expect to see somewhat rapid progress here, at
least to handle common cases, and we'll see if edge cases reveal any
challenges in the overall design or implementations.


> Looking in the page for mentions of
> parsers, I only see discussion on relationship between parsers for
> v1-style markup and the new approach.

The discussions I've seen about writing/updating parsers to support
microformats-2 have been either informal or on IRC so far, where a lot
more discussion seems to happen these days than on the mailing list
(perhaps a good time to give the list a heads up in case people here
want to check out IRC)

http://microformats.org/wiki/irc

irc://irc.freenode.net/microformats

Thanks,

Tantek