This post was actually inspired by Kyle Neath’s article “I just don’t get this whole Microformats thing”, where the author is expressing his own frustration about the Microformats movement being over-complexified. It really reminded me of one of my pet peeve’s on the subject.
Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.
Now this is the definition of Microformats, from microformats.org, and I really disagree with the first half… Designed for humans first and machines second.In my mind Microformats exist for a single purpose - as a way to semantically define common data types, from simple data types such as coordinates, currency, temperature to much more complex types such as events, reviews and people. This is done by building structure on-top of existing standards, such as HTML, in such a way that it is transparent to the end-user. This structure is what allows Microformats to be remotely useful - its a means for identifying data so that it can be consumed.So who actually consumes a Microformat? The sidebar of this webpage contains a hCard, and there are other Microformats scattered throughout the site. Most user’s don’t know they are there, and even if they weren’t, the content would still look exactly the same. So, the user can’t really be considered the consumer.If we look at some of the software out there which utilize Microformats, they mostly perform three actions:
- Detection. The identification of Microformats within a page.
- Consumption. The extraction of data within a Microformat.
- Utilization. Doing something with the data.
These are common across many applications, for example, if we look at the Geo Microformat, an application based on that structure may perform the following functions:
- Detect presence of a Geo within a page.
- Extract coordinate values.
- Pass the coordinates to Google Earth for viewing.
Detect. Consume. Utilize. If we look at another use case:
- Detect a hCard on a page.
- Extract hCard values.
- Import contact into iCal as a vCard.
Detect. Consume. Utilize.In fact, thats Microformats in a nutshell… Detect… Consume… Utilize… - they make it easy to get at your data, like giving your Web page its own API. Data can become more portable, with it becoming a trivial task to click on a name on Web page and have them added to your address book, and data can be leveraged by other applications in new and interesting ways.Now, some of cases are all possible with or with-out Microformats, its just that Microformats make the Detection and Consumption a great deal easier (otherwise you would need to be doing a lot of text analysis and pattern matching) and more accurate. A lot of potential services, undoubtedly the cooler and more useful ones, which follow the DCU model are only made possible by Microformats due to the complexities of D and C - unless the data is revealed in some way, an application or service cannot interact with it.Although designing for humans is a great philosophy, in this case its a bit inaccurate. At the core you are designing for software… for consumption. It is not humans who are doing this consumption, thats pretty much guaranteed, but rather it is humans who are and will be seeing the benefits of microformats. Wether it is ease of use, portability of data or otherwise.This post was actually inspired by Kyle Neath’s article “I just don’t get this whole Microformats thing”, where the author is expressing his own frustration about the Microformats movement being over-complexified. It really reminded me of one of my pet peeve’s on the subject.
Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.
Now this is the definition of Microformats, from microformats.org, and I really disagree with the first half… Designed for humans first and machines second.In my mind Microformats exist for a single purpose - as a way to semantically define common data types, from simple data types such as coordinates, currency, temperature to much more complex types such as events, reviews and people. This is done by building structure on-top of existing standards, such as HTML, in such a way that it is transparent to the end-user. This structure is what allows Microformats to be remotely useful - its a means for identifying data so that it can be consumed.So who actually consumes a Microformat? The sidebar of this webpage contains a hCard, and there are other Microformats scattered throughout the site. Most user’s don’t know they are there, and even if they weren’t, the content would still look exactly the same. So, the user can’t really be considered the consumer.If we look at some of the software out there which utilize Microformats, they mostly perform three actions:
- Detection. The identification of Microformats within a page.
- Consumption. The extraction of data within a Microformat.
- Utilization. Doing something with the data.
These are common across many applications, for example, if we look at the Geo Microformat, an application based on that structure may perform the following functions:
- Detect presence of a Geo within a page.
- Extract coordinate values.
- Pass the coordinates to Google Earth for viewing.
Detect. Consume. Utilize. If we look at another use case:
- Detect a hCard on a page.
- Extract hCard values.
- Import contact into iCal as a vCard.
Detect. Consume. Utilize.In fact, thats Microformats in a nutshell… Detect… Consume… Utilize… - they make it easy to get at your data, like giving your Web page its own API. Data can become more portable, with it becoming a trivial task to click on a name on Web page and have them added to your address book, and data can be leveraged by other applications in new and interesting ways.Now, some of cases are all possible with or with-out Microformats, its just that Microformats make the Detection and Consumption a great deal easier (otherwise you would need to be doing a lot of text analysis and pattern matching) and more accurate. A lot of potential services, undoubtedly the cooler and more useful ones, which follow the DCU model are only made possible by Microformats due to the complexities of D and C - unless the data is revealed in some way, an application or service cannot interact with it.Although designing for humans is a great philosophy, in this case its a bit inaccurate. At the core you are designing for software… for consumption. It is not humans who are doing this consumption, thats pretty much guaranteed, but rather it is humans who are and will be seeing the benefits of microformats. Wether it is ease of use, portability of data or otherwise.
Tags: microformats