microformats-ja

microformats

microformatsとは何か?

microformatsとはこのようなものだ

• データについて考える方法
• 書式のための設計原則
• 現在の振舞いと用法パターンに順応するもの ("Pave the cow paths." - Adam Rifkin)
• 意味的XHTMLと高度に相関した「実世界意味論」、「小文字のセマンティックウェブ」、
• 「損失の無いXHTML」として知られるもの
• Tantek's recent presentation at SXSW: The Elements of Meaningful XHTMLに記載されているもの
• より適切に構造化されたウェブログや小さめのコンテンツを一般に公開するための、様々な個人や組織のコミュニティで活発に開発や実装が行われているシンプルなデータフォーマットのオープンスタンダードの集合
• 「進化論的な革命」 - Ryan King
• 上記のすべて

microformatsはこのようなものではない

• 新しい言語
• 無限に拡張可能であり、無制限なもの
• 皆がその振る舞いを変え、そのツールを書き直させようとする企み
• 今日既に働いているものを無駄にする真新しいアプローチ
• すべての分類学(taxonomies)、オントロジー(ontologies)および他のそのような抽象化のための万能薬
• 全世界を定義したり、広範囲に悪影響をあたえるだけのもの(defining the whole world, or even just boiling the ocean)
• どこかの個人や組織にコントロールされているもの
• 上記のいずれでもない

the microformats principles

• solve a specific problem
• start as simple as possible
  • solve simpler problems first
  • make evolutionary improvements
• design for humans first, machines second
  • be presentable and parsable
  • visible data is much better for humans than invisible metadata
  • adapt to current behaviors and usage patterns, e.g. (X)HTML, blogging
  • ease of authoring is important
• reuse building blocks from widely adopted standards
  • semantic, meaningful (X)HTML. See SemanticXHTMLDesignPrinciples for more details.
  • existing microformats
  • well established schemas from interoperable RFCs
• modularity / embeddability
  • design to be reused and embedded inside existing formats and microformats
• enable and encourage decentralized and distributed development, content, services
  • explicitly encourage the original "spirit of the Web"

• Related Principles we re-use from other design paradigms
  • DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself)
  • Least Surprise
  • Pareto Principle (80/20)
  • Data Integrity. One of the common objectives which many of the principles help achieve is data integrity.
    • Visible data = more accurate data. By designing for humans first and making the data presentable (thus viewed and verified by humans), the data is inevitably more accurate not only to begin with (as errors are easily/quickly noticed by those viewing the pages/sites), but over time as well, in that changes are noticed, and if data becomes out-of-date or obsolete, that's more liklely to be noticed as well. This is in direct contrast to "side files" and invisible data like that contained in <meta> tags.
    • Not repeating yourself (following DRY) - means there are fewer chances for inconsistency
    • Multi-language integrity. Perhaps not a principle, but many of those involved with microformats have found that consistently using UTF-8 helps ensure that the human text content itself is not corrupted, especially when using non-ASCII7 characters.

現在のmicroformats

現在のmicroformatsの仕様やドラフト、ディスカッションのリストがあるメインページを見てください。

more thoughts on how microformats are different

There are plenty of existing formats that are nearly totally useless/ignored.

They're not totally useless though. They're useful in that they illustrate what at least someone thought might be useful, which unfortunately is typically a lone-inventor working a-priori without any domain expertise.

Or there is the other extreme. Lots of corporate inventors working with plenty of experience, over-designing a format for what might be needed some day. In particularly bad cases, the corporate vendors collude to prevent openness and/or adoptability by the open source community. Media standards often suffer from this kind of deliberate "strategic" positioning.

We seek to combat all of those problems with the microformat approach.

• We're not lone-inventors; we're a community.
• We don't work a-priori ("from reason alone"); we require documentation of existing examples, previous attempts at formats. See process.
• When lacking domain expertise, we seek out the domain experts to provide it, and we immerse ourselves in examples and prior art from the domain (see previous point).
• We do our work in the open with open discussion forums.
• We're a diverse mix of corporate, independent, hobbyist, enthusiast.
• We don't over-design. We under-design, deliberately, and then only add things when they are absolutely necessary.
• We adopt very liberal copyright/licensing (CC,GMPG,IETF,W3C) and patent positions (RF,IETF,W3C).
• We ruthlessly self-criticize based on our principles in order to keep to the above.

Some ask what the purpose of the (intended) standards is.

Why do you need purpose? More often than not, premature focus on purpose tends to distort data formats towards a particular application which may not be all that relevant. Hence rather than focus on a-priori purpose, we focus on modeling existing behavior, with the knowledge that additional structure will yield plenty of interesting uses, most of which we will not be able to a-priori predict.

This is obviously a very different approach than traditional data format efforts.