Why Microformats is a good thing an why we need to stop worrying about labels
Chris Messina left this comment:
This is certainly a good thing and major accomplishment, regardless of what you call it.
In fact, Tara and I discussed avoiding the controversy over the whole “PINKO” name by renaming it FART.
If “microformats” doesn’t work for you, “Structured Blogging” won’t work for someone else, so why don’t we call it FART as well? And yes, we should rename AJAX to FART also, just to keep the trend alive.
Point is this: regardless of who delt it, Yahoo! and many others have now smelt it and are doing something with it. The bigger questions is, especially for PeopleAggregator, is what to do with it now that we’ve got this massive data store — in XHTML or whatever.
But let’s face facts, browsers have done poorly rendering anything but XHTML (with a little RSS and ATOM thrown in lately). There no consistency on SVG, on VRML, on XML, or even on RSS! But you *can* click on a link on a webpage and have something happen… and you can right click on an image and save it to your desktop. With microformats, now we have to figure out what kind of behaviors and interactions make sense in order to bring the benefits of these structures that we’re all so gaga about out to normal folks who seriously could care less about all the FARTing out in Silicon Valley.
Right on to Chris! I totally agree. What’s right with one is wrong with another. That’s a quote from a Pete Seeger song.
In fact - I should mention that we’ve hired Chris and Tara Hunt to help us launch PeopleAggregator and liaison to the web services developer community. I’m really excited about working with them, not only because they keep things real and me honest, but because Tara is smart as hell and totally groks what building communities is all about.
We consider ourselves lucky to be able to work with Tara and we’re looking forward to connecting up with all sorts of Live Web web services vendors.