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

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.