Microformats
Saturday 2 September 2006 ◷ 16:26
In Web 2.0 days all a webmaster has is a pimped webform to publish his content, while in Web 0.0 days web publishing was more centered around copying stuff from your home directory on the server to your web-directory on the same system. So in the old days it wasn't that hard to have a .plan, finger service, create an entry in an X.500 like system, or create a vCard and link to it with an anchor or embed it with an object element in HTML. On page 7 of some hype in a scientific skin the possibility of using an object element to embed a vCard in valid XHTML is simply ignored ("vCards files are not embeddable in valid XHTML documents", what part of "generic embedded object" don't you understand Mr. Matthieu-P. Shutupnow?). Sure if you live in a Web 2.0 world it's pretty hard to have some application export something as a vCard file on your system, upload it to your myspace account, figure out what the URL is, hope their server sends it with the correct MIME-type, hope it's not treated as malicious content somewhere along the way, use a textarea to type in an object tag pointing to it and then annoy users with systems that still don't support an RFC from 1998. Web 2.0 is not about improving the web. Web 2.0 is about rephrasing what has always been in HTTP and HTML, in a way that every noob thinks he understands it and can directly type a suboptimal implementation of in his community-panel du jour and within 15 minutes crown it with a shiny icon, next to his self assigned valid XHTML, RSS, AnyBrowser patches showing he's a good boyscout, ready to be taken advantage of by the people making money pushing the Web 2.0 train...
How does this affect microformats? Well, for a long time I couldn't understand why people were so enthousiastic about such lame workarounds. It's like listening to a pretty meaningless discussion about which is the fastest route from A to B, until you realize you're the only one in the discussion flying a helicopter and all the others are restricted to their bicycles, and most of them are not even aware of the existance of helicopters: they are basically missing several dimensions in the solution-space. So if your audience can't run a dedicated service on their server, can't influence HTTP headers, can't do XSLT, can't do HTTP content negotiation, can't use Dublin Core, but are only allowed to type HTML in a textarea, microformats might seem like a good idea. But for anyone beyond the add-surrounded web-"application" that is your Gmail, MySpace etc., there are real solutions. They are just not as hyped by crypto-Microsofts...
Sebastiaan Smid
Tuesday 5 September 2006 ◷ 14:24
re: Microformats
I really like the style ! keep up the good work.
tomnie
Tuesday 5 September 2006 ◷ 15:30
re: Microformats