microformats

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Moving Forward

We've got a whole host of new initiatives going on.

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I've been buried with work and obligations. There is much to report. Expect to hear more here soon about veg-o-matic, blogging bootcamps, and new initiatives.

Bud posted this on March 26, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Greasemonkey: Becoming Less, Not More

User-agent XML scripting is a key enabling technology for remixing web content. For security reasons, the most recent release of greasemonkey doesn't allow you to use a large portion of firefox's native XML support in greasemonkey scripts. Using firefox as a centerpiece in remixes just got harder.

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A few months ago, I announced the veg-o-matic project. We developed user scripts using Greasemonkey to then republish microformatted content into reblog 2.0 Alpha. The idea was to create a way of generating an attention stream that could be shared with a group of people. This attention stream would extend beyond material made available in RSS. For instance, members of a work group could extract contact information of an important sales lead (formatted using the hCard HTML microformat) from a web page and post it in their information stream for other members to use.

The advantage of using greasemonkey was that it allowed full access to firefox's exemplary XML-processing capabilities in a pretty easy-to-master scripting environment. For security reasons, the most recent release of greasemonkey doesn't allow you to use a large portion of firefox's native XML support in greasemonkey scripts. This change effectively breaks the front-end of veg-o-matic, and it is unclear there is an easy fix.

While I understand the developers' security concerns, it seems like one of the major selling points of using greasemonkey just went away without much compensation.

Update: The lead developer of Greasemonkey has posted a comment in which he assures me the removal of the XML processing capabilities is only temporary due to a bug. The one nit I would pick is that how to convert legacy code to the now-supported E4X, an emerging javascript standard for XML-processing, is not always obvious. Let me recommend this resource for it which got me going enough to realize the extent to which my stuff did not work.

Bud posted this on December 4, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

xFolk Veg-o-matic Alpha

We provide a way to surf the web and slice and dice information you find there into your own custom output stream.

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The folks at Eyebeam and Stamen are getting set to release a public alpha of Reblog 2.0. Reblog now provides a web-based RSS reader and a way of republishing RSS items in light weight content management systems like blogs (currently Movable Type and WordPress). The new version is going to expand on that functionality by allowing people to collect microformatted items in web pages and republish them in a variety of formats.

In other words, Reblog is becoming like a Veg-o-matic for information. It slices and dices information into the stream you want. By default, you can publish this stream as a web page or various types of RSS feeds that can in turn be republished in a blog.

Right before Labor Day, I released a pre-alpha version of a greasemonkey script, aka xfolk-veg-o-matic, that takes advantage of this architecture. The script scans a web page for all instances of xFolk microformatted content and adds widgets to them so that readers of the page can republish them in Reblog. For those unfamiliar with xFolk, it is a microformat for tagging links and creating distributed social bookmarking systems. This post explains how to install and use the alpha version of the script that will be packaged with Reblog 2.0 Alpha.

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Bud posted this on October 16, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Veg-o-matic: An alpha web service using xFolk

“It slices, it dices ...” More specifically, this post presents an alpha release of a web service based on greasemonkey and reblog that identifies, validates, cleans, and republishes xFolk microformatted content. All comments are welcome.

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I'm releasing a very alpha hack of an xFolk web service for this labor day weekend. Recall that xFolk is a microformat for representing the sort of social bookmark data you would find on a site like del.icio.us. A lot of people are republishing their links from such sites in their blogs. The advantage of using a microformat like xFolk for this sort of thing is that it makes it easier to write software to do something useful with the data.

The hack I am presenting here is a combination of a greasemonkey script and an alpha version of the reBlog refeed tool by eyebeam research and stamen design. The main action of interest is in the greasemonkey script that:

  • Finds all instances of xFolk microformatted content in a page.
  • Determines which of those instances are valid (i.e., contain all the required elements as indicated in the xFolk spec).
  • Creats a clean clone of the xFolk entry that only contains elements specified in the spec.
  • Uses an xml object to serialize the cleaned clone into a form element for republishing.
  • Adds a script to the valid xFolk instances that makes it possible to republish their “cleaned” version via Mike Migurski's alpha rewrite of the reblog republishing tool released by eyebeam and stamen

Continue reading "Veg-o-matic: An alpha web service using xFolk"

Bud posted this on September 2, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Microformats and Innovation

I see microformats as an opportunity for invention. Writing a microformat spec itself is not that hard. The politics of getting a microformat adopted by an expert group can be daunting. Innovators need to focus on areas that are truly new to avoid this quagmire.

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Microformats are a way of writing html pages so that they are amenable to automated data processing while still easily read by people. Lucas Gonze feels the standardization inherent in the microformat writing process drives out innovation, specifically:

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Bud posted this on August 6, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Microformats in Business — Structuring Content for Search & Collaboration

In my reckoning, there are two business propositions right now in microformats: 1) Structuring data for search and business intelligence, already successfully demonstrated by technorati; 2) Structuring content for collaboration, likely monetized through a service similar to BasecampHQ.

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Microformats are really just a way to combine human and machine readability in one web page. Microformats are superior to similar infrastructure plays because the average web designer can incorporate them with very little work.

So, what's the business proposition for combining human and machine readability? Right now, I can come up with two.

Continue reading "Microformats in Business — Structuring Content for Search & Collaboration"

Bud posted this on August 3, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Follow-up to Greasemonkey & Microformats

We are nearing the point where we can write a full tutorial on microformats identification. In the next post, I'll discuss how all of this can fit into a business model.

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The point of my last, rather technical post was to start to provide a tutorial for newcomers to microformat development. The post led to a good amount of follow-up from the micrformats community. The basic strategy of using the user agent's (i.e., browser's) native ability to parse html and isolate parts of the markup based on attribute values is sound. That said, there are a couple of refinements in order.

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Bud posted this on July 31, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Greasemonkey & microformats: Getting started

This post presents a ten line javascript that can be used to identify and process virtually any microformatted content. The script uses the Firefox web browser's greasemonkey framework. The script and the general capabilities of modern web browsers suggest a general processing strategy for microformatted content where identification and pre-processing occur in the browser.

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Greasemonkey is designed to make user javascripts easy to write in the Firefox web browser. Since greasemonkey's introduction, literally hundreds of people have written and contributed scripts that alter a page's markup to enhance the user experience. A knock against greasemonkey has been that it amounts to using javascript for ad hoc screen scraping. Greasemonkey scripts are easy to write, but you almost have to write a new one for each web page, and scripts are often not robust to even simple changes in markup on the pages they are written for.

Thus, greasemonkey and microformats seem a natural for each other. Microformats make it possible to create semantic markup structures in standard xhtml that are re-used across many web pages. Greasemonkey scripts written to trigger solely on microformatted xhtml markup could therefore be automatically re-used across many web pages. Further, since microformats are created following standard specification writing practices, deprecated microformat constructs remain part of the spec for some time after their deprecation. When a microformat was revised, greasemonkedy scripts written for that microformat would need only be updated to add triggers for the newer constructs.

However, novices to user scripting, and I count myself among these, generally find scripting for microformats challenging. Microformats add semantics to markup by creating conventions around the use of attribute values. Isolating these attribute values and using them to trigger processing can seem daunting as related by Brian Suda in his account of creating an XSLT script to process hCard, one type of microformatted markup. A simple inspection of this script reveals the pains Suda had to undertake just to identify when the microformat was being used.

I'm writing this post today to introduce a simple greasemonkey script that presents a general and robust method for identifying microformatted content. The script makes use of capabilities built into both Firefox and Microsoft's Internet Explorer that make processing microformatted markup easier than it might be in other contexts. The remarkable simplicity of this script (there are only 10 lines of code) coupled with its power (it even works on pages that are not well-formed) suggests that greasemonkey and microformats are natural allies if you just know the trick of getting them to cooperate.

Continue reading "Greasemonkey & microformats: Getting started"

Bud posted this on July 28, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)

Innovating for Value in Blog Search

Innovation in blog search will be more and more driven by the extent to which it can be used for business intelligence. Three players, bloglines, technorati, and blogpulse have all made important advances in this regard. Rests to see whether they can capitalize on them.

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In response to my post about blog search imitation on Wednesday, Marc-Olivier Peyer of pointblog has asked if we could not benefit from a little more innovation. That seems reasonable, and I'd like to frame my response in terms of where we have already seen innovation based on the revenue potential. I expect that that is where we will see more in the future.

The first thing I note is that blog search engines exist because blogs are different from traditional web pages. Blogs are increasing at a faster rate than the rest of the web. Blogs, with an average update frequency of once every 10 days, are updated more frequently than the rest of the web. Blogs, with an average of 100 outbound links, have more outbound links per site than the rest of the web.

As a result of these differences, the value of blog search engine's indexes is closely tied to timeliness and the ability to represent linking relationships in addition to the traditional elements of coverage and relevance. Businesses in search of market intelligence seem the most easily monetized market for this kind of data. Businesses are typically aware of the need for market intelligence, and they are willing to pay when they perceive significant opportunity. By contrast, monetizing blog readers through contextual ads does not offer significant revenue potential.

Continue reading "Innovating for Value in Blog Search"

Bud posted this on July 22, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

Imitation is the surest sign of success

I disagree with Jason Calacanis. IceRocket's adoption of tagging using a format invented by technorati indicates that technorati is achieving wide marketplace acceptance. By my estimates over a million bloggers are using the technorati format.

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Today, Jason Calacanis wrote about how icerocket, a blog search engine, had added tagging support.  Jason's remarks were, typically for him lately, riding technorati a bit.

But it's how IceRocket supports tags that's the real kicker.  They're using the reltag microformat invented by Tantek Çelik, Kevin Marks, and Derek Powazek of technorati as explained on this IceRocket help page.

Continue reading "Imitation is the surest sign of success"

Bud posted this on July 20, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Work Overload

I've been busy, keeping me away from blogging.

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I've been away from blogging because I have been caught up in other things. I'll be back to posting more regularly. Let me list a few of the things I have been up to:

Bud posted this on July 17, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

xFolk RC1 — An xhtml microformat for social bookmarking

xFolk is a simple and open format for publishing collections of bookmarks. It better enables services for improving user experience and sharing data in web-based bookmarking software. Providers can view user efforts to create new services using xFolk-formatted data as a sort of low-cost R&D.

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This post announces release candidate 1 of xFolk, an xhtml microformat for social bookmarking as popularized by del.icio.us and a growing host of other services. Microformats are conventions for conveying information on the web in a way that is easily machine processible. Users can then experiment with ways of presenting and combining it. These experiments are, in effect, a sort of low-cost R&D, that web publishers may choose to capitalize on as they pan out.

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Bud posted this on July 8, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Distributed Tagging Hell

When many pieces loosely joined break, all hell can break loose without too much effort. Apologies to Tim O'Reilly who I have tracked back to 4 times at least for just one of his posts and all of you who are getting duplicate posts in your feeds.

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At O'Reilly's Where 2.0, Stephen Randall put it best in terms of what he wants for usability:

  • One hand (not complex for those who get it)
  • Two billion people (anyone can get it)
  • Three steps (no time commitment)

Neither Movable Type nor distributed tagging (via technorati) are like this, but they need to be.

Continue reading "Distributed Tagging Hell"

Bud posted this on June 30, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Microsoft's Virtual Earth and the remixable web

Web 2.0 hacking with things like Virtual Earth is seductive but subject to potential lock-in. What we need are open data formats that can match the speed of hacking development that will make these services more plug and play. I wonder if microformats are up to that challenge.

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I'm at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 today. Microsoft has presented a neat application, Virtual Earth. It's not out yet, but you can see propaganda at the site I linked.

What's neat about this service is that they make explicit allowance for social applications. You will be able to do things like put up reviews of local businesses and integrate them with maps. I had been talking with Ryan King at technorati about this just two days ago in discussing a location microformat. I wanted to find a set of reviews for local gyms near my sister's house in San Francisco. Sure, she and her friends had ideas, but they were not tuned in to the kinds of things I look for (I am a workout addict).

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Bud posted this on June 30, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Microformats and the remixable web

To answer Jon Udell and others, microformats enable the remixable web.

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Yesterday, I spent the day at technorati and the evening with Tantek Çelik, Ryan King, Jeff Barr, Chris Messina, and a host of others at the second ever (?) microformats group dinner. A lot happened, and I'm not here to give a blow-by-blow account. Rather, I want to convey the one major insight I walked away with (there were many minor ones). To answer Jon Udell, Microformats enable the remixable web.

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Bud posted this on June 30, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Copyright and the remixable web

Will remixing the web encourage people to use more liberal copyrights because the value of participating is higher than the value of retaining an exclusive lock on their data?

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I'm listening to the John Battelle panel on local search at O'Reilly's Where 2.0. John Frank of Metacarta just raised the point that dhtml (aka ajax, an easy javascript technology for mixing in content into web pages from web services) enables copyright infringement, a bad thing from the perspective of the recent Supreme Court ruling on file sharing services. You're probably okay if you do not encourage stealing of copyrighted materials. I wonder if things like microformats and easy data sharing will push more and more providers into putting more liberal copyright restrictions on their work that allow for sharing.

Bud posted this on June 29, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

Microformats.org & xFolk

I think I will put xFolk on microformats.org. Any thoughts?

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As many are no doubt aware, a number of folks have started a microformats blog, wiki, and repository at microformats.org. It is very likely that I will move xFolk to that venue.

To be honest, as an outsider to the founding group, it's possible to feel concerns about control. Will I find xFolk arbitrarily changed by founding group members? Will they give it prominent enough position?

My interactions with Tantek Çelik, Ryan King, and Kevin Marks, three of the founding members, and my own edits on the wiki to date suggest to me that these concerns are remote at worst. More importantly, I think xFolk will gain by being out in the public space open for edits and debate by the community at large. I do plan to maintain an editorial role in xFolk using the usual wiki mechanisms, and I also plan to continue promoting it.

So, I think I will move xFolk to microformats.org. Any thoughts?

On a wing and a prayer.

Bud posted this on June 22, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

West Coast Mini-Tour, June 26 – 30

If you'd like to meet me during the mini-tour, please drop me a line. Email link is in the post body.

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June 26 – 30, I'm going to be in the Bay Area (San Francisco, specifically) catching up with Tantek Çelik and “The” Ryan King on microformats, likely attending the Vertical Leap conference signaled to me by Dave McClure of simplyhired, and attending at least part of Where 2.0. It's going to be an exciting trip. As I signaled earlier this week, microformats have some real implications for distributed business models. Specialty search engines like technorati, simplyhired, and gataga would seem well positioned to take advantage of microformats in their business models.

If you would like to see me on this tour, drop me an email. I'm very interested in meeting readers. Please note that my geographic knowledge of the Bay Area is limited. For instance, I thought the SDForum where Vertical Leap will be held was in San Diego (SD, get it), so keep that in mind when suggesting meet-up locations. Fortunately, a quick phone call with Dave McClure cleared up the SDForum confusion before I booked a flight to San Diego.

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Bud posted this on June 18, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Microformats provide immediate search visibility

Unlike structured blogging, microformats offer tangible business benefits that are being realized by companies today. Technorati's use of the reltag microformat to propel itself to high search visibility offers one case study.

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Recently, John Battelle and Charlene Li have taken up the subject of structured blogging. The underlying issue is making publishers' data visible to specialized web aggregators. These aggregators make a business of publishing specialized content like movie reviews, typically perceiving revenues from advertising placed around the targeted content.

Most reviewers perceive the discussion so far to be largely theoretical. This perception is actually incorrect. Technorati, a blog search engine, has been making profitable use of a related but simpler technology called microformats for the past six months.

Specifically use of the reltag microformat has propelled technorati to top search results for niche terms like podcasting and “social software”. The increased search visibility translates into more traffic to technorati's pages and more exposure for their sponsored links.

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Bud posted this on June 14, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

de.lirio.us implements xFolk

Steve Mallett of de.lirio.us has formatted their folksonomy listing pages using xFolk. When folksonomy publishers implement xFolk as their output format, their users still have the same hassle-free bookmarking interface and gain more highly semantic markup for no cost. The more semantic the markup, the better Internet visibility.

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Steve Mallett, creator of de.lirio.us, has formatted their folksonomy listing pages in xFolk:

I set up de.lirio.us to do this [publish using xFolk markup] a few minutes ago. I must say I do like this a better than the technorati tag format thing. I like technorati, but it's a bit too technorati-centric.

Conversation on tags & liberating tagged data - I did it anyway | Fooworks - 'blog of Steve Mallett

Steve's major issue was how using xFolk would affect the end user, a point raised just today by Tantek Çellik in regard to gaining acceptance for microformats.

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Bud posted this on June 5, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

An xFolk 0.4 Implementation for Blogmarks

xhtml microformats like xFolk make sharing information easier. Their greatest value is realized when they are used by large numbers of people. To that end, I am pushing for xFolk's implementation as a publishing format for several social bookmarking tools. Blogmarks is the first to respond.

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As put so well by Peter Merholz among others, xFolk is:

... a markup extension to allow tags to be created anywhere, not just through systems like del.icio.us.

You’re It! » xFolk - technology for decentralized tagging

Just to be clear, the “tagging” he is talking about is when people bookmark things they find on the web under informal categories (tags). These tags can make that bookmark easier to find later and to quickly find related (similarly tagged) resources. Systems like del.icio.us enable the tagging (labeling) itself, and they let users share the tagged bookmarks among themselves. Tagging has proven to be quite popular, at least among a certain group. You might think of it as appealing to the same urge that causes people to become coin, art, or music collectors.

The point of xFolk is to make it possible to easily share your bookmarks outside of systems like del.icio.us. One important step in getting this vision to reality is to get services that enable tagging to use the xFolk format. BlogMarks.net (a social bookmarking tool originally signaled to me by Jonas Luster) has been kind enough to share template code that you can use with their blog sync feature to make xFolk formatted bookmarks from their service appear in your blog.

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Bud posted this on June 3, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

Web 2.0 can and will be commoditized

Many information business models rely on network effects derived from their exclusive access to social networks. Standardized xhtml microformats for sharing social data level the playing field for smaller players by making it possible for them to pool their data. These pooled data can provide the same positive network effects as the exclusive networks possessed by larger players.

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Peter Merholz makes an interesting observation regarding what many are starting to call Web 2.0:

On a sales call with a potential client, I tried to impress upon her the need to fundamentally reconsider how her company approaches what they do, and I used the analogy of Snapfish/Ofoto/Shutterfly and Flickr. The former were stuck in pre-Web, pre-networked-world ways of thinking about people, things, and relationships. The latter is built, ground-up, *of* the Web, and recognizes that the “value-add” (as business types like to call) lies not in the production of things (which inevitably get commoditized and provide negligible margins), but in the provision of services that provide an experience you simply can't get anywhere else.

peterme.com: Death Throes of a Business Model

I've been giving this topic a lot of thought lately as I have moved forward with developing and trying to sell business owners on the xFolk xhtml microformat, a format designed specifically to commoditize large aspects of the types of services Peter is describing.

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Bud posted this on June 1, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBack (1)

xFolk Entry 0.4 — Microformat for decentralized tagging

xFolk Entry 0.4 is a new iteration of the xFolk microformat that is extremely easy to implement. It enables the publication of tagged bookmarks so that they can be harvested on the web and aggregated into folksonomies. As such, xFolk eliminates the need to rely on centralized data repositories to create folksonomies.

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xFolk is an xhtml microformat that enables users to tag and share bookmarks on the Internet without using a centralized system such as del.icio.us or flickr. To give a concrete idea of how xFolk facilitates decentralized bookmark tagging, consider a writer who wishes to publish a list of related links at the end of a web article. At the end of the article, the writer simply formats the links and tags in xFolk. Then a web crawler that understands xFolk can digest the page and extract the link information, placing it in one of possibly many directories. In this example, xFolk's underlying use of well understood standards already widely used by publishers and crawlers eliminates the need for the centralized services that currently exist. A similar scenario exists for link blogs.

xFolk 0.4 vastly simplifies the xFolk 0.3 microformat proposed six weeks ago so that it can be implemented in under five minutes on a variety of web publishing platforms. The simplification was achieved in part by splitting xFolk 0.3 in two: (1) xFolk Entry, described here, for indicating folksonomy tags and annotations for links in web articles and (2) xFolk Definition, described in a later post, for providing folksonomy tag semantics. Additionally, xFolk Entry 0.4 now makes use of the widely adopted reltag format, further limiting the scope that xFolk itself must cover. Finally, xFolk Entry 0.4 reduces the number of class attributes to three without a reduction in expressive power.

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Bud posted this on May 31, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBack (7)

xhtml microformats — What's the use?

Proof is in the pudding for microformats.

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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

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Bud posted this on March 31, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)