Lucas’ roundup of Microformats
It’s not that I’m skeptical about all these new tags and what not (in fact we’re probably gonna support ALL of them enthusiastically) it’s just that I’m a grizzly old wisened software guy who recognizes a cult when I see it.
I’ll tell yah a story from SXSW.
So all the interactive geeks were shunted down the hall, in a corner of the convention area. And as we all were leaving one day - there was a table set up with “all of them” (at least the ones in Austin) having a meeting.
I think they call their group GMPG (though I’m not sure what’s multimedia about it) and they LITERALLY I swear to you - yelled at us as we walked by “THIS IS A PRIVATE MEETING - YOU CANNOT ATTEND”.
I thought that was cute. Very nice and cordial I’d say. I’m sure it was pointed at me - but some of the other folks with me caught the breeze to - a stiff one.
Well anyway - Technorati is putting it’s full weight behind all this and god bless them. I sure hope soemthing comes of all this - but it is kind of silly to refute files as a way to store profiles or to absolutely insist that everything has to be in the URL. I wonder if they admit that schemas need to exist?
One of Eric Meyer’s slides admitted they needed to “work with servers” as a future feature.
Yah - uh huh - working with servers might be a good thing to support.
April 9th, 2005 at 1:41 pm
I’ve recently written a piece on the (lowercase)semantic web.
I admit, though, that I’d probably be considered a microformats cultist.
April 10th, 2005 at 12:36 pm
Heh, the GMPG history would be a little credible had it mentioned that FOAF appeared 2 or 3 years before they “developed the initial principles for XFN”. Reminds me of a certain RSS history - what is it with these simplifiers?
But given I’m somewhere around agnostically, optimistically conflicted on the whole lower case thing I’m not gonna argue. As long as I can join the grizzly wisened table.
April 10th, 2005 at 10:39 pm
There must be some confusion. GMPG is three guys: myself, Tantek, and Eric Meyer. If you saw at us a table we’d invite you for a drink. The table you saw was for a WaSP (Web Standards Project) meeting and if they were hesitant to socialize it’s probably because that’s the one face-to-face meeting a year they have and there’s a lot to get through in very little time. I remember you and Robert Scoble walking by and really any other time would have been great for a casual chat, but just not then. Perhaps you could update the entry to avoid more confusion?