Sometimes in the fervor of generating a new idea, you neglect that the reason to charge ahead is not as apparent to others. This is particularly the case if the machinery that makes the idea work has not been built yet. Such, I think, is frequently the case with xhtml microformats which can be thought of as a means to annotate web pages for better machine processing. Josh Porter put it well earlier today:
What I’m not sold on yet is the usefulness of microformats. I don’t have any use for them yet, and as far as I can see there has been a lot of pushback on the “nofollow” microformat. But what about the others? I know of rubhub.com, but what use is it? Any ideas out there? I’m new to this stuff…
Joshua Porter, Bokardo
Basically, he raises the question, “What does it do for me?”, and he hits the nail on the head about the best-known microformat, “nofollow”. “nofollow” is supposed to stop the practice where spammers insert URLs into comment forms on popular sites by denying them search engine credit. So far, there has been no noticeable reduction in spam, at least on my sites, so the benefit is nebulous.
The key lesson here for microformat designers is to expect a long uptake time for the format until tools are built that directly benefit the intended users. People may feel attracted to the benefits you claim for your microformat, but proof is in the pudding. In the real world, many people will not invest for change until they see the proof.
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