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Re: address tag

for

From: Tim Beadle
Date: Feb 19, 2007 7:40AM

On 15/02/07, Jukka K. Korpela < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> That's irrelevant as such. What matters is whether markup is based on
> well-designed, publicly reviewed and stable specifications _and_ whether
> it becomes widely used.

What's not public about the Microformats process, Jukka? You could
join in - edit the wiki, join the mailing list.

> We have a long tradition of great confusion -
> consider the rel="..." and rev="..." values for links. Everybody and his
> brother invents new values and doesn't even bother defining what they are
> really supposed to mean, as a matter of unambiguous semantics.

Except the values of class, rel, rev and title are the product of
design and consensus. There's lots of definition of "what they are
really supposed to mean" if you have a look on microformats.org.

> Such promises mean splitting the Web into incompatible microwebs. Luckily,
> it is mostly just idle talk, hype, and pompous plans.

Really? "Incompatible Microwebs"? Wherever do you get that idea from?

> Except when the particular microbabble happens to conflict with other
> microbabble systems that are actually supported in some software, _or_
> with processing of tags by their old semantics or by legacy rules.

Microbabble? Could we lay off the pejorative language, please?

> There
> are so few tags and attributes in HTML that you'll end up with conflicting
> with _something_ rather soon.

That's rather a negative outlook, isn't it? I admit I haven't been
using Microformats for that long, but I've seen no conflicts as yet.

> Even <span title="...">...</span> isn't
> harmless, since the title attribute _may_ be rendered to the user, perhaps
> by special request, in a visible or audible way

That's a fair point.

> even if a microformat fan
> wanted to use it just for specific purposes to be handled by some fancy
> "semantics aware" software.

"Fancy semantics aware software". Could we lay off the pejorative
language, please?

> "Semantic web" is a great idea, but it won't even start getting realized
> before the current "Semantic Web" fashion has been killed and buried
> decently.

Semantic Web (capital SW), as defined by the w3c, hasn't even got
going yet, mainly due to its insistence on purity and academic theory.
Microformats work precisely because they're simple and make use
(largely) of existing data within an HTML page.

See more at Mike Davies' blog:
"I nipped in with my stock standard accessibility question on what the
potential implications of microformats on web accessibility. Jeremy
had a clearly well-thought out answer to hand, which demonstrates that
accessibility has been considered, and not as an add-on. Essentially,
microformats create no new barriers for people with disabilities - in
the very rare case this may one day happen, the microformats are
ignorable. But there's a great wealth of richness on offer to
assistive technologies - in the microformat itself there are
identifiers and unambiguous data that can aid understanding and
comprehension. It is up to the assistive technologies vendor to take
advantage of these microformats in their devices."
http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/semanticweb/WsgMicroformatsTalkLondon2006

> The _practical_ way to be semantic on the web at present, and in the near
> future (and I mean years and decades), is to express your content verbally
> in a clear, unambiguous, and easily understandable way. Words matter.
> Search systems are being refined, but mostly so that they process _texts_
> (and links between texts) in more elaborated ways.

Yes, words matter. In HTML as it stands, though, you still can't
define what content actually *is*, much of the time. Microformats let
you do that with many common types of data.

Perhaps you would like to actually find out a little more about
Microformats before declaring that they are of no practical use?

Tim