steve cooley presents

A ‘click’ Moment ?

2nd June 2006, 12:46 pm

My Colleague Bill says:

A ‘Click’ Moment :
Alex Iskold, who I�ll quote in full from the �Formats list:

I am fairly new to microformats. My initial reaction was why not describe the page data in XML first, then use XML to describe the presentation and then use XSLT to produce the actual HTML page.

I then realized that this approach does not solve a problem. In fact it misses the point of microformats, which is to embed the meta-data with the data, to make the data ’self-describing’ and to eliminate the need for additional query and parsing.

Using RDF does not bring anything new to the solution, in fact there maybe a lot of solutions to the format problem. For that reason the format that we choose should be as short as possible, so that we do not make the documents super verbose.

I spent, and sadly feel like I wasted, a couple of months trying to figure out how to bend microformat/structured blogging to meet the needs of archival fine art cataloging for my artwork. I was using an existing XML schema defined by a consortium, so it wasn’t like I was trying to poorly define my own data structure..

Part of the problem was the “why don’t you run your idea past us so we can tell you how it can be more like something someone else has already done” mentality… (it’s right there in their manifesto: “if you’re thinking of defining a new microformat: don’t.”) , another part was the newness and sparsely defined workflow of the structured blogging plugin for wordpress, and admittedly part of it was my lack of understanding of how XML works in conjunction of how microformats and structured blogging works. I got the feeling that it shouldn’t actually be me that has to bend to the will of system, but the other way around. In order for structured blogging and microformats to work, the system needs to bend to me. Otherwise, I just don’t see the benefit over being able to let my publishing package of choice interchange with other systems with RSS… try as you might to convince me, if it ain’t easy to use, it ain’t going to be in use.

Oh well.. maybe some day it will make sense again.