Well its been a fun weekend - I went up to London with Mr. Dreyfuss for the Microformats vEvent at the Brew Wharf. True to form, it was an alcohol fueled evening, culminating in a cheeky pint at 4am in a lesbian bar back in Brighton!Given that our next project revolves around Microformats (I’ve been sworn to secrecy apparently, but on a unrelated note I have been brushing up on my Objective C lately…), it was good to actually talk to people who also spend a bit of time scratching their heads and thinking “Hmm… how could these things be useful?”.From an outsiders perspective, its interesting that the focus seems to be mostly on the ‘complex’ formats, describing contacts, events, reviews, resume’s etc. Especially as I’m a lot more interested in the more simple formats such as currency, geo etc. Why? Two reasons:
- They are easy to detect. Lets face it, most people are lazy and when we talk about content creators then what incentive do they have to use microformats if they either don’t understand how to use them, or have to do extra work in order to integrate them. The more you can automate this, the more people will use them. This is fairly trivial if you are pulling data from a database and then presenting it on a Web page - you already know what data items you are dealing with - but if you take an example of a blogger, then you are just adding overhead.Ideally we want to move toward a scenario where content management systems and blogging engines can take a chunk of free form text, recognize that it contains certain data which can be represented as a microformat and then add the markup. The problem? How would you go about writing a parser that can recognize hCards? Its a slightly complex task! On the other hand, it is a lot easier to parse some text and recognize things such as currency values, coordinates, temperatures etc. Focusing on these low-level formats provides a way to quickly get these formats being used, and puts you in a much better position to tackle the challenge of automating the creation of hCards, hEvents and more complex formats.
- They are things I often want to do things with. Take the currency example, I’m on an American website and I want to know how much something will cost in UK Pounds, I open a new window, fire up XE.com and use the convertor. Wouldn’t it be so much easier if this was done by the browser, either automagically, or when I click on the price…
Any thoughts on this are welcome, not being part of the Microformats inner circle, I may just be spouting total crap, but from a developers perspective the smaller formats are what I think could be most useful in the short term in order to get more people producing microformats.In other news, I may see some of you at the Sussex Geek Dinner on Wednesday - I fully expect to end up totally hammered and swimming in the sea! Also off back to the US next week - currently my itinerary includes Las Vegas (Adobe MAX ‘06), Phoenix, Denver and New York - it should be a nice chance to do some christmas shopping! Hopefully I should be back in Brighton for Flash on the Beach. I’m quite enjoying work at the moment - aside from the travel, its quite interesting at the moment - our new homepage is launching later this month and its looking funky!On the blog front, possibly considering a move to Mephisto when I get time, and stay tuned for an article later this week talking about structuring development teams for more effective Web development. Its something partially inspired by what I have been doing recently at work, and also by some of the sessions at dConstruct. Until then, have a nice week! (more…)
