« Mixercast: Alanis Morissette Videos | Main | YouTube RSS feeds don't validate »

May 28, 2007

Microformats: Interesting presentations

Alex Faaborg of Mozilla UI Design team gave an amazing presentation on Microformats at Web 2.0 Expo.

Please check it out, it's really cool. You can download the slides (PDF-144 pages, 54.8 MB)

You can also check out the presentation by John Allsopp (author of Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0). I got a slideshare version of the same, embedded right here:-


Download above slides (PDF).

Posted by Abdul Qabiz at May 28, 2007 09:37 PM

Comments

I like the basic idea and concept behind Microformats, however I think the technology is a cheap hack. It would be better if the W3C standards would handle this.

Posted by: Erik at May 29, 2007 02:37 AM

Hi Abdul,
I am not able to get RSS feed of your blog.

Posted by: Rahul at May 29, 2007 04:22 PM

@Rahul: Strange, browser should auto-discover it and there are links in right-sidebar (bottom)..

BTW! Here is RSS 2.0 feed: http://www.abdulqabiz.com/blog/index.xml

Did you get the link and it threw some error?

Thanks

-abdul

Posted by: Abdul Qabiz at May 29, 2007 06:30 PM

@Eric:

> I like the basic idea and concept behind
> Microformats, however I think the technology is a
> cheap hack. It would be better if the W3C
> standards would handle this.

W3C can't handle everything, it's a body with limited folks. That's why WHATG group started thinking about future of HTML, now W3C is again supported WHATG...

Microformats, to me, are clean way of doing things using existing standards (Semantic HTML). Microformats don't require you to change existing stuff rather you can add more meaning (human + machine readability + structured ) to the content at the same time make it more inter-operable (for machines, with desktop etc)..

I think, W3C would start talking about microformats..

-abdul

Posted by: Abdul Qabiz at May 30, 2007 03:12 PM

@Abdul: Yup, I agree that W3C is a somewhat slow organisation and I also think it's good that others help pushing the development forward. I do not however think that using the class attribute to mark up information is what was intended for. It would be better if HTML would support some other kind of flexibility in marking up data without the need of new tags/elements for that matter. But, until then I'll happily embrace microformats. :)

Posted by: Erik at May 30, 2007 04:22 PM

@Eric: Microformats can be applied in different ways, class is one of the ways of doing things..

I mean, if I have to design something from scratch I would design my CSS stylesheets that classes are named in right way, best-practice don't name class "blueHeadline" rather it should be meaning full in context of data it's going to style..

Like "fn" - First Name etc... So you can create class names that solves two purpose:-

1) Style the data
2) Adds the meaning - microformat

To add microformats to existing pages, people use space separated classes...

Makes sense? These are just my understanding, I am sure there would be better explanation on Microformats website.

BTW! You can apply micrformats in different ways, but not many people use other type of selectors (class is the most used).

-abdul

Posted by: Abdul Qabiz at May 30, 2007 08:01 PM

Post a comment




Remember Me?


Please enter the security code you see here

(you may use HTML tags for style)