Category
microformats
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barcamp, microformats
BarCamp Manchester
Saturday, November 18 saw the first Barcamp Manchester and it was a great success. About 75 people showed out of the 100 signed up on the wiki. I gave a presentation on microformats and semi-structured documents (giving props to Jon Udell who has been talking about these concept while and to the microformats group for gathering momentum). Sudha Jamthe’s presentation on building the business side of the web was excellent. For pics, see Dave Seah’s flickr pool tagged barcampmanchester.
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microformats, structured blogging
A Pulse at StructuredBlogging.org
As of 11:43 PM last night, the structured blogging mailing list is back on line. This came via email from Phillip Pearson:
—–Original Message—–
Sent: Sunday, August 06, 2006 11:43 PM
To: sb-discuss@structuredblogging.org
Subject: [structuredblogging-discuss] This is a test – SB mailing list isalive again!As you’ve probably noticed, the structuredblogging-discuss mailing list has been in limbo since PubSub went under. We’ve finally found a new home for the list, on a server at Broadband Mechanics. Everything should continue to operate as usual – here is a quick test message to make sure it’s all set up right!
Given PubSub’s role with the launch of structuredblogging.org, questions regarding its future were raised when PubSub went down. I had the pleasure to get to know PubSub co-founder Salim Ismail last week and chatted with him about the state of PubSub and the future of structured blogging. Personally, I have no doubt there is a future for structured blogging, but it certainly seems unclear it’ll continue in its current form. It’ll be interesting to watch how structuredblogging.org fits into the picture considering the size of the development communities behind blogging tools like WordPress and the momentum and popularity of Microformats.
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microformats, rss
Debugging hCalendar Feed
I’m back from vacation and catching up on things. Charlie Wood asks:
Since you were talking about microformats at the Gilbane show, I’m hoping you can help me. I’ve been banging my head against hCalendar support in some RSS feeds all day, and I’m hoping you can help me see something obvious that I’m blind to. There’s a demo feed that is valid RSS, and has everything (I think) needed for hCalendar support, but when I run it through Technorati’s Events Feed Service I get back a calendar with no events. What am I missing?
I recalled a time when I tried to do this as well— and remembered discovering the service only handles XHTML as it uses Brian Suda’s X2V, which he describes as “a BETA implementation of an XSLT file to transform and hCa* encoded XHTML file into the corresponding vCard/iCalendar file.” I verified that this still is the case, but considering Technorati’s continuing support of open microformats standards, I imagine that’ll change.
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microformats, search, web
Microformats: breathing life into web content
05.26.06 | Permalink | 2 CommentsAn interesting conversation came up at work around embedding XML documents into web pages using namespaces, and in my opinion, the conversation entirely underscored why microformats make sense. Since the late 90’s, there have been many efforts to standardize the way information is described using XML. While these definitions have been useful for many applications, their usefulness typically fails to translate to the web for a couple of reasons.
Case-in-point, look at MathML. The first version was designed by a W3 committee in 1999. It has been used successfully in many applications. Yet even after seven years, the popular version of Internet Explorer still requires a third-party plug-in to view it. This means, if an organization wants to store math related content as MathML, yet wants to publish it in a web format supported by major browsers, it must first transform the MathML into something browser-friendly like a PNG or GIF.
This scenario points out two of the bigger problems with XML on the web:
- Web applications often fail to deliver content retaining the structure found implicitly in XML and databases. Rather, web applications typically take structured data and transform it into web friendly (unstructured) formats like HTML and GIF.
- Web applications that deliver structured content typically rely on browsers having the capability to display it. For example, in order for MathML to properly display in a web browser, it must have support it out of the box (such as FireFox), or have a plug-in (like Internet Explorer).
Why are these problems worth overcoming? Look at Google. Its search algorithm exploited one of the few bits of structured data available in plain-vanilla HTML, the hyperlink. Give programs the ability to easily extract meaning from a web page and you get something indistinguishable from magic.
Microformats stand as a possible solution to these problems. They leverage the existing popularity of XML based web-friendly formats such as XHTML and RSS and do so in a way that makes the technology accessible to the average web developer knowing only HTML and CSS.
With microformats, data is both structured and web friendly at once. So instead of embedding XML documents within an web page, consider the benefits of hiding them.
