• If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

BarCampBlockMicroformats

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 7 months ago

BarCampBlock : BarCampBlockSessionNotes

 

18 August 2007 --

 

Convened by Tantek Çelik.

 

What can you do today?

hCard supported by Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, Twitter, Upcoming.org, Barcamp.org.

 

"Install the Operator plug-in for Firefox" -- it detects microformat information and is able to re-dispatch actions on them, e.g. adding hCard information to your addressbook, adding hCalendar to your calendar.

 

Outside the browser: "I only want to add the 3 restaurants in this search result page that have been reviewed by my friend."

 

Rob Lord: Microformats outside the browser. Working on Firefox-based media player. Metadata around an image, including its context, can be valuable -- e.g. pointing back to where it came from. Specific metadata around an image, or around a song, embedded in an image.

 

Tantek: The data is already on the page, often. If you can mark it up, you can use it.

 

Q: Ecosystem vs. RDF/Semantic web?

A: GRDDL (wikipedia) converts microformats to Semantic Web triples.

A: Microformats choose specific, single, small vocabularies for particular applications, vs. RDF -- overarching semantic format. Having small standard vocabularies supports interoperability regarding common information notions that people want to exchange.

 

Rob Lord: Visual, textually presented data repackaged via markup. SongBird -- have to read the first chunk of the MP3 in order to present relevant metadata.

Tantek: Visible data, published on the web, by many people. Aims to solve the 80% problem. There are a ton of easy-to-solve problems that will help many people. If we solve all the "visible metadata" problems, let's proceed to the harder problems.

Rob: That's a sustaining innovation strategy rather than a disruptive innovation strategy. It's often the disruptive innovations that really launch new formats.

 

Tantek: What next?

Audience: Getting buy-in from developers.

Tantek: Great idea, but what should I bother? Like RSS in the beginning.

A: Get people to know the term.

A: Self-descriptive formats help standardization.

Q: Who has implemented microformats in their own site?

A: hCard for my contact information. It was practically zero effort. It made sense to use the standard if it was easy to implement. If you're planning to use classes in your HTML mark-up, you might as well go the next step and use the standard.

Q: WordPress plug-in perhaps?

Q: Leverage points being the tools and systems that people already use? WordPress or MT or whatever?

Tantek: Getting users to adopt it relates to the story of getting developers to adopt it?

Comment: Needs to be useful and not overlap something else, so the user has to decide between one and the other. It has to work very easily. I installed Operator as you were speaking and I've been trying to get it to work, and it doesn't seem to do anything.

 

Francine: (re introducing new technologies/techniques)

Me: "I read two dozen newspapers a day."

Friend: "How do you do it?"

Then I get to explain RSS feeds to my friend.

 

Q: Is there a comment like that that gives that "aha" for microformats?

 

Comment: The best use I've seen is the "Satisfaction" forums re product feedback. When you sign up for your account, you can click on a picture of the site that you already use, and it will fill out your user information based on that site -- last.fm, twitter, etc.

Thor Muller (Satisfaction: People Powered Customer Service): We removed "microformats" from the headline, it's down in the fine print. We're just saying something like "autofill your information."

Comment: A "how does this work?" link for those who are curious?

 

Tantek: Developers will buy in to a solution that's useful to users, like this autofill example.

 

POSH - Plain Old Semantic HTML - using semantic mark-up such as <P></P> <EM></EM> <STRONG></STRONG> in preference to visual mark-up such as <BR /> <I></I> <B></B> and dispensing with tables for alignment, using them only for tabular information. Publishing content on your site in a POSH way can be a good prelude to a microformat.

 

See also: http://microformats.org/wiki/events/2007-08-18-community-meetup