Re: "Pave The Cowpaths" Design Principle

On May 17, 2007, at 4:00 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:

>
> Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>> 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).

Is that really the key difference? rel also left remaining names free  
for author use. Is moving from 0 to 1 predefined names really a much  
bigger deal than moving from N to N+1?
>
> 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.
>
The original topic was semantic use of class names. For that, my most  
relevant example was class="geo" which you snipped. I don't think  
that anyone would dispute that it is a semantic use of a class name,  
and a microformat based on just a single class name.

Debating what is and is not a microformat is not very germane to the  
discussion.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Thursday, 17 May 2007 20:03:59 UTC