Re: On the messaging issues (was also the RDF/XML discussion on the call)

On 05/12/06, Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org> wrote:
> Paul,
>
> yes, the microformat community has gone its own way, and we are not very
> successful (yet?) in getting closer to them. It is difficult to say why,
> here are some of *my* feelings. It may be characteristic for *some* of
> the problems we have.

I'll pull your line from below up here -

> Note also that things are changing. The GRDDL work may have a major
> impact on this!

There was impedance mismatch in communications early on, with
microformats & semweb folks treading on each other's feet somewhat,
mild antagonism. But folks like our own Ian Davis and Dan Connolly
have since been active around microformats, and one of the leading
microformats developers, Brian Suda, is on the GRDDL WG. So now the
efforts are fairly complementary.

The microformats initiative has been remarkably successful at getting
(generally domain-specific) machine-readable data on the Web, but that
leaves open the question of what you can do with it. Opportunities
there for nice semweb demos, with the bonus that they are likely to
encourage the microformats branch of Web 2.0 to be more open to the
potential of semweb tech.

Going the other way, there are quite a few good reasons for semweb
folks using microformats (perhaps augmented with Ian's general-purpose
Embedded RDF) in their HTML publishing.

Not far away there's similar outreach potential through Atom (format
and protocol) - ok, it's CMS domain-specific, but it's also perfectly
good data. Lee and others are already on the case there.

Cheers,
Danny.

-- 

http://dannyayers.com