Microformats a ‘gross hack’
Dare Obesanjo has been trying to grok microformats and his latest analysis highlights the key shortcoming - which is that the microformats camp thinks that their solution for subscription is just to send the xHTML page out via vanilla RSS.
This was one of the main reasons we created StructuredBlogging - as - instead of arguing with them and ‘hacking’ in subscription support for micro-content = I say we just superset them, support microformats in all it’s glory and just ALSO fill in the holes with otehr formats and techniques for doing the same dam thing - via RSS namepsaces or whatever.
Hopefully this “we can all live together” approach will find some traction.
I think Dare is forgetting that most microformats have nothing to do with the XHTML syndication thing - they’re just about marking up stuff like reviews, license references, events, and tags.
I just posted this comment on his blog:
What Joe said — the concept of making your homepage machine-readable and throwing away your feed isn’t being seriously considered by the microformats people. It’s just one of those “hey, cool, look what this could enable if we wanted to do something totally weird” things.
Most microformats coexist nicely with feeds. Look at what we’re doing with the Structured Blogging plugins (structuredblogging.org), for example. If you publish a book review, it is marked up in the blog’s HTML pages using hReview class attributes, and the exact same HTML gets published in the feeds.
I think Dare is forgetting that most microformats have nothing to do with the XHTML syndication thing - they’re just about marking up stuff like reviews, license references, events, and tags.
I just posted this comment on his blog:
What Joe said — the concept of making your homepage machine-readable and throwing away your feed isn’t being seriously considered by the microformats people. It’s just one of those “hey, cool, look what this could enable if we wanted to do something totally weird” things.
Most microformats coexist nicely with feeds. Look at what we’re doing with the Structured Blogging plugins (structuredblogging.org), for example. If you publish a book review, it is marked up in the blog’s HTML pages using hReview class attributes, and the exact same HTML gets published in the feeds.
I think Dare is forgetting that most microformats have nothing to do with the XHTML syndication thing - they’re just about marking up stuff like reviews, license references, events, and tags.
I just posted this comment on his blog:
What Joe said — the concept of making your homepage machine-readable and throwing away your feed isn’t being seriously considered by the microformats people. It’s just one of those “hey, cool, look what this could enable if we wanted to do something totally weird” things.
Most microformats coexist nicely with feeds. Look at what we’re doing with the Structured Blogging plugins (structuredblogging.org), for example. If you publish a book review, it is marked up in the blog’s HTML pages using hReview class attributes, and the exact same HTML gets published in the feeds.
I think Phil overstates matters when he says: “throwing away your feed isn’t being seriously considered by the microformats people.”… One thing we must remember is that Technorati, a major supporter of “microformats,” relies on reading web pages not feeds when gathering blog data. Technorati seems to use feeds as nothing more than indicators of changes to pages. They index the full content of the page even if you only put a summary in your feed — and they claim this is a “good” thing that gives them competitive advantage over those systems that don’t. Thus, they appear to view it as to their advantage if they can convince folk to publish data in HTML pages that *does not* appear in their feeds.
bob wyman
I think Phil overstates matters when he says: “throwing away your feed isn’t being seriously considered by the microformats people.”… One thing we must remember is that Technorati, a major supporter of “microformats,” relies on reading web pages not feeds when gathering blog data. Technorati seems to use feeds as nothing more than indicators of changes to pages. They index the full content of the page even if you only put a summary in your feed — and they claim this is a “good” thing that gives them competitive advantage over those systems that don’t. Thus, they appear to view it as to their advantage if they can convince folk to publish data in HTML pages that *does not* appear in their feeds.
bob wyman
I think Phil overstates matters when he says: “throwing away your feed isn’t being seriously considered by the microformats people.”… One thing we must remember is that Technorati, a major supporter of “microformats,” relies on reading web pages not feeds when gathering blog data. Technorati seems to use feeds as nothing more than indicators of changes to pages. They index the full content of the page even if you only put a summary in your feed — and they claim this is a “good” thing that gives them competitive advantage over those systems that don’t. Thus, they appear to view it as to their advantage if they can convince folk to publish data in HTML pages that *does not* appear in their feeds.
bob wyman