[whatwg] "Just create a Microformat for it" - thoughts on micro-data topic
Ian Hickson
ian at hixie.ch
Tue May 5 22:54:06 PDT 2009
On Tue, 5 May 2009, Ben Adida wrote:
> Ian Hickson wrote:
> > Are you saying that RDF vocabularies can be created _without_ this due
> > diligence?
>
> Who decides what the right due diligence is?
The person writing the vocabulary, presumably.
> One organization for *all* topics, ever?
I don't think that would really scale. Even for major languages, like
HTML, we haven't found a single organisation to be a successful model.
Manu's list didn't mention anything about a single organisation:
On Tue, 5 May 2009, Manu Sporny wrote:
>
> Creating a Microformat is a very time consuming prospect, including:
>
> 1. Attempting to apply current Microformats to solve your problem.
> 2. Gathering examples to show how the content is represented in the
> wild.
> 3. Gathering common data formats that encode the sort of content
> you are attempting to express.
> 4. Analyzing the data formats and the content.
> 5. Deriving common vocabulary terms.
> 6. Proposing a draft Microformat and arguing the relevance of each
> term in the vocabulary.
> 7. Sorting out parsing rules for the Microformat.
> 8. Repeating steps 1-7 until the community is happy.
> 9. Testing the Microformat in the wild, getting feedback, writing
> code to support your specific Microformat.
> 10. Draft stage - if you didn't give up by this point.
Surely all of the above apply equally to any RDFa vocabulary just as it
would to _any_ vocabularly, regardless of the underlying syntax?
Consider each of these in turn:
1: You have to make sure you're not reinventing the wheel, whatever
language or vocabulary you are designing.
2: You have to make sure whatever language or vocabulary you are designing
is something that your users can use.
3: If you do have to invent a new language or vocabulary, it makes sense
to base it on the base of knowledge humanity has collected on the subject.
4: You have to study the information collected in steps 2 and 3 to make
sense of it.
5: Deriving vocabulary names is a key part of any language design effort.
6: Justifying your design is a key part of any language design effort
also. Not doing this would lead to a language or vocabulary with
unnecessary parts, making it harder to use.
7: With any language, part of designing the vocabulary is defining how to
process content that uses it.
8: Defining any language or vocabulary effectively must, clearly, involve
a feedback loop with community review.
9: The most important practical test of a language is the test of
deployment. Getting feedback and writing code is naturally part of writing
a format.
10: You have to specify the language.
As far as I can tell, the steps above are just the steps one would take
for designing any format, language, or vocabulary. Are you saying that
creating an RDF vocabulary _doesn't_ involve these steps? How is an RDF
vocabulary defined if not using these steps?
--
Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
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