- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>
- Date: Sun, 4 Jun 2006 07:07:40 -0400
- To: public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf@w3.org
>From the "I saw this and thought of you" department... http://smackman.com/2006/06/01/an-old-idea/ Has an interesting account of some current difficulties with microformats, as well as a proposal for a schema system. I haven't digested the latter, but certainly agree with the problem analysis: Excerpting, [[ Ive been giving some thought to parsing microformats lately. A few threads seem to be converging The first is that its hard to parse microformats. You can hand-write a parser in a little bit of time thats 80% right. But getting all of the hcard rules, e.g., encoded is tricky. Its reasonable to assume, therefore, that there are a lot of 80% parsers out there like the one I wrote for my Ray Ozzie Clipboard example. The second issue relates to hatom, which uses different class names for the same concept at different scopes. For example, the entry title is called entry-title not title. I asked Ryan about this when I saw him at www2006, and he told me that they vacillated on this decision, but they settled on entry-title because people can nest other microformats inside hatom, and so it would be easier for the parser writers if there were no colliding class names, even in different microformats. In fact, he suggested that theyd probably made a mistake with hcard, since the class names were so likely to collide with other microformats. Ok, so in other words entry-title is a hack around the problem of it being hard to parse microformats, and we can expect more of these. When I bumped into Brian at the same event, I commented that microformats really have a problem with nesting. He agreed. He said it put a burden on the parser writer to potentially have to understand all microformats in order to reliably parse web pages that contain them. So, 1. Its a lot of trouble to write a parser 2. Bad parsers will proliferate 3. Microformats are evolving toward being easier to parse, not easier to create 4. Its not clear how you can nest microformats w/o knowing how parsers will behave 5. Users are discouraged from inventing their own specialized microformats, presumably because of the risk of collisions and difficulty others will have in parsing them [...] ]] Dan
Received on Sunday, 4 June 2006 11:07:51 UTC