[whatwg] microformats incompatible with WebApps 1.0 ?

[Ian Hickson]

On Mon, 11 Dec 2006, Mike Schinkel wrote:
>
> What's needed is a single and "officially recognized" clearing house for 
> anything metadata tagged to HTML attributes.

It isn't clear to me that this is true. I believe this is one of the 
reasons we are having difficulties with this conversation -- we're 
starting from different initial assumptions.


> -- Microformats.org should become a clearing house for "official"
> microformats using the structure below.
> -- There would be three classes of Microformats: horizontal and
> vertical/specific, and vendor.

Your use of the term "microformat" seems very loose. A microformat isn't 
just anything that uses keywords in HTML's extension attributes; a 
microformat is a format that has gone through the very rigorous process of 
research, design, and public study that Microformats.org documents. The 
entire concept of a vendor-specific microformat is an oxymoron, for 
instance.

We've managed to survive quite well without a "clearing house" for ways of 
marking up metadata; I don't understand why we would need anything as 
formal as you request. With a place for people to come together and 
discuss proposals (the WHATWG wiki at the moment), and with the natural 
market forces that human endeavours like this end up involving, I don't 
really see that there's anything to solve. At least not yet. 

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'