Microformats – The nanotechnology of the web, 07/11/07, Secret Plans and Clever Tricks

November 07, 2007

Microformats – The nanotechnology of the web

Writing about web page http://www.microformats.org

Centralised vs. Decentralised: Smart vs. Dumb

- The internet is a dumb, decentralised network, but each component is just smart enough to get by, and this leads to the whole being very resilient to complexity
- RDF vs HTML: RDF is too complex and hard to publish. Anyone can make HTML
- If markup were robots, XML/RDF would be mechas – big, cool, but not for everyone, HTML would be a nanobot – Dumb, ubiquitous, and reliant on network effects to acheive anything
- People first, machines second. Given a trade-off between ease of publication and ease of machine-consumption, favour publication heavily.
- Microformats are an 80/20 solution; some use cases just aren’t do-able with microformats. That’s a deliberate design choice. Go for the low-hanging fruit

Microformat building blocks:
– the rel attribute on links and anchors: rel=”license”, XFN ( rel=”friend met colleague” etc)
– the class attribute: hCard, class=”vcard”, class=”fn url”; hCalendar
– hCalendar is an example where a microformat has had to give way on the ease-of-publication vs. ease-of-consumption scale; dates are specified twice;
```
[abbr title="2007-11-05" class="dtstart"] November 5th [/abbr]    
```

(2007-11-05 is an ISO standard format for dates)

- microformats are seeds
- expose – CSS.
- Discover – Firefox Operator
- Convert – technorati XSL service

problems:
– Spam
– trust
– these are problems with HTML generally; microformats don’t make this easier or harder
– grey goo – explosion of formats – there’s an established process for developing new microformats, to control adoption.
– Microformats vs. POSH (Plain Old Semantic HTML)
Community: wiki, irc, email, blog (tag microformats)
The future
– portable social networks
– syndicated contact details
– semantic web (little-s little-w). No RDF!

Chris May : 07 Nov 2007 08:53 | Tags: Microformats Web20Expoberlin | Comments (2) | Report a problem

2 comments by 1 or more people

Andy Mabbett

Microformats are cool; but what you describe as “giving way on the ease-of-publication vs. ease-of-consumption scale”, the mis-use of ABBR, is an accessibility issue – one which the microformats community has been aware of for over a year, but has yet to adequately acknowledge, let alone address.

07 Nov 2007, 17:36
Chris May

...what you describe as…

It’s not my description, these are just more-or-less verbatim notes from Jeremy’s presentation. Nevertheless, thanks for pointing it out.

Incidentally, the microformats wiki has a whole bunch of pages on the issue, so I think it’s incorrect to assert that the community hasn’t “adequately acknowledged” the issue, regardless of whether you feel it’s been adequately addressed or not.

07 Nov 2007, 21:00

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November 07, 2007