[Drupal Con AMS 2005] Chris Messina on Microformats and Drupal
created on Tue, 2005-10-18 06:55
- History of the web
- Browser war
- XML
- Combine semantic language with something that's standard across all browsers
- Use tools that you already have to markup document semantically
- principles:
- solve a specific problem (find standard classes, i.e something that's being solved over and over e.g. re-using Vcard standard and code, and iCal i.e already in wild but not in XHTML)
- start as simple as possible (e.g. playlists - media in a certain order)
- playlist people want 40 classes
- simple test - can people remember classes
- perhaps reuse XOXO (outline format) for playlist? i.e. so don't need 40 classes
- reuse building blocks (iCal, vCard)
- use modularity and embeddablity (hcard + iCal = birthday reminder)
- enable and encourage decentralized and distributed content
- reduce - solve a specific problem , start as simple as possible
- spread out the work
- Example 1 - rel tag
- used in flickr, technorati, gada.be
- e.g. rel="tag", assign keywords to stuff
- not just for technorati, can use tag space in your url space not Technorati's!
- Tags = Categories 2.0 :-) !
- Boris - wiki.bryght.com to make it work with drupal using path-auto
- rel-directory - distributed directory <a rel = "tag directory" href="http://technorati.com/blogs/webzine">Webzine</a>, hmmm OPML?
- XFN - extensible friends network, FOAF is RDF version e.g. <a rel="acquaintenance met">Tantek</a>
- hCalendar
- made text field names in iCal field names into XHML spans (make them into XHMTL classes that has have semantic meaning) and voila hCalendar, can be done via XSLT
- same with hCard
- rel-license - this content on this page is governed by this license
- vote-links = precursor to rel nofollow, vote-for, vote-abstain, vote-against
- geo for geotagging
- rel payment for affiliate links
- summary: no longer slinging classes and making up the names, have standard names for CSS and XHTML classes
- my take: microformats are the "worse is better" approach to getting structured data into HTML and XHTML, so simple u can handcode and trivial to put into Drupal and other automated blogging and content management systems
- How stable: for those based on iCal and Vcal i.e. existing popular standards, it's stable
- actually have a process for building a microformat ("paving the cowpaths")
