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    10/4/2005

    Microformats Update

    Ryan King point out to me that the hReview microformat does support the min / max rating information I was complaining about. I'm going to have to dig into these microformats a bit more before I pass judgment. What I did realize in doing some additional reading on microformats is that I've un-wittingly stepped into the middle of a battle between the XHTML folks, and the XML folks. It seems the microformats crowd feels HTML is perfectly suitable for representing structured information, rendering formats like plain XML and RSS pointless. On the flip side, we have quite a large crew of folks who feel structured data via XML is the way to go. At this point I have to say, I think I'm leaning toward the latter group. I'd much prefer to parse XML over wild wild western world of HTML any day of the week. And I find it hard to believe that RSS for a web site could easily be implemented using the raw (X)HTML of the page as the syndication source.
     
    Phillip Haack makes some interesting comments back in July on the subject. Dare jumps in as well.
     
    But I'm not passing judgment yet. I've stumbled into a very interesting discussion and want to dig a little deeper.
     
    UPDATE

    Some clarification from Ryan via email: 

    "I ask this because in reading more about it, it feels like the microformats camp is saying that there's no need for RSS XML, you just structure the data in the HTML of your site, and, for example, a client aggregator would then go to the page for the information it's looking for."

    What we're saying is that RSS is an envelop format- useful for delivering data, but you should put the data *in* the envelope, not on the outside of it. The point is to have one, cananonical representation of your data, which you can publish in xhtml, rss (in the payload), or arbitrary xml.

    10:58 AM | View trackbacks (13) | Blog it

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