[whatwg] microformats, microdata, and custom data attributes

[Tab Atkins Jr.]

On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 2:24 PM, Justin Karneges <justin at affinix.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday 19 April 2011 03:27:30 Rob Crowther wrote:
>> Justin Karneges wrote:
>> > Given that it is meant primarily as a data exchange protocol, explicit is
>> > better, so I'm preferring Microdata instead of Microformats here.
>>
>> The strength of the Microformats community is in helping to define the
>> vocabulary, that's a different issue from the format you'll use to
>> represent it.
>
> Ah, I simply assumed these were two competing approaches.  Does this mean
> Microdata has no community behind it to work on vocabulary?

Microdata is a syntax for encoding vocabularies into an HTML page,
similar to how class/rel can be a syntax for encoding vocabularies.
The vocabularies themselves can be defined largely ignorant of the
encoding syntax, as long as the vocab's underlying data-structure ends
up being more-or-less tree-based (vocabularies defined for RDF are
officially graph-based, but in practice can usually be treated as
tree-based).


> In any case, I think the Person object defined by data-vocabulary.org should
> work for my purposes.  But, if I feel the need to invent something new, I can
> propose it to the Microformats community first if that's the right process.  I
> am quite new to these communities.

Sounds acceptable.  The Microformats community is friendly and open,
as far as I've experienced.  Have fun!

~TJ