Re: "Pave The Cowpaths" Design Principle

Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> On May 16, 2007, at 10:14 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:
>> But, as someone else has also pointed out, not from the ones I've seen 
>> thrown around as examples of potential standardisation (such as 
>> "copyright"),
> 
> True, 

Perhaps the inhabitants of this list need to find a better example, 
then. :-) And if we can't, we should abandon the whole idea as unnecessary.

> It's true that many of the complex microformats have a root class name, 
> and multiple included structural elements identified by class="" or 
> rel="" values. However, there are many trivial microformats based solely 
> on a single rel value, such as rel="nofollow". (The rel-nofollow 
> microformat is adopted directly into HTML5, I believe without 
> controversy - people don't seem to worry about rel as much as class.)

I think the difference is that rel already has predefined names; the 
point of class was that it didn't (and so authors could use any name 
without fear of unwanted side-effects).

Also, "rel=nofollow" almost seems too simple to be a microformat. Is 
"autocomplete=off" a microformat too? We seem to be stretching the 
definition of "microformat" quite a long way, such that it is losing 
meaning.

Gerv

Received on Thursday, 17 May 2007 11:00:32 UTC