examples

Best Practices for Example Pages

Example pages are the first stage of the exploration process which must precede proposing a new microformat. Current explorations are listed on the Main Page. You can use the examples-template to help you create your own page.

Purpose of Example Pages

(adapted from process)

Document current human behavior. Remember, we're paving the cowpaths- before you do that you have to find the cowpaths. Your documentation should be a collection of real world sites and pages which are publishing the kind of data you wish to structure with a microformat. From those pages and sites, you should extract markup examples and the schemas implied therein, and provide analysis.

Recommended sections

Top level (=):

• Introductory sentence

Second level (==):

• The Problem)
  • What is the purpose of this exploration?
• Participants
  • Bulleted list of who is active (or cares)
• Real-World Examples
  • Links to public web pages, either popular or insightful
• Existing Practices
  • Summary of common patterns discovered
  • Other attempts to solve The Problem
• See Also / Next Steps
  • Link to related pages as they become available
    • *-formats
    • *-brainstorming

Good Examples of Examples

The following pages are some of the best examples of instantiating this design pattern:

• reviews-formats
• blog-post-formats
• blog-description-format

A Good Example Has

A good example has several things:

• URL to the actual example on the Web
• Link text of that hyperlink should be look like a citation of that example, e.g. who, what site
• Perhaps an illustrative snippet of code (markup) from the example
• Analysis of the implied schema represented by that snippet, with at a minimum a flat list of the "fields" present in the snipped.

When Adding Examples

When adding examples to an existing *-examples page, please try to add the examples into the existing organizational structure in the page. E.g. if the examples are grouped or categorized in a certain way, try to add new examples into those existing categories, instead of a new section.

If you have to add a new category or subsection, do so, but try to do so in harmony with existing categories. If it is not obvious how to do so, or if the categories don't seem to make sense, then it might be a good time to ask a question on the mailing list or irc channel.