Microformats

Lots of good ideas at eTech - the convergence around microformats stands out. Plum already has some microformat support and we'll be adding more.

I admit that I approached microformats as more than a bit of a skeptic. I'm one of those pointy headed people who likes not only XML but XSL too. XML and XSL completely separate data from presentation in a way that HTML never did, and they both do so in very powerful and complete ways. But there is just one problem: data without presentation is useless and XSL does not have a good getting start story. Ok, getting started with XSL is just plain old painful.

What I like about microformats is they define data on the web in a standard way, they are pretty small, and they have a really great getting started story: just standardize your use of CSS class names to something pretty close to what you are doing already anyway. Since it's XHTML it's parseable and embeddable in atom, rss, and other XML formats.

Right now microformats are concentrating on really common bits of data in web pages: addresses, reviews, and events. These are all areas where the off line world already developed standards. As microformats evolve the flat namespace is probably going to start to bog down the process - light small standards change and adapt quickly and big ones (even big simple ones) do not.

The other thing I saw at eTech was a lot of RSS and Atom for information exchange. We're all doing it - plum, Microsoft Live, and of course every ajax api out there. If that's the future, why not evolve microformats to use namespaces when they are embedded in RSS, Atom, or any other XML format?