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.

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
• Proposal
  • Link to related pages as they become available
• See Also
  • Other micrformats
  • Normative references for tags used

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