Folow up on Microformats

There’s been a lot of discussion around the Semantic Web and microformats and I’d like to follow up on some comments I’ve received.

It seems that much of the opposition to Microformats amounts to “but RDF|OWL|Whatever is more powerful|expressive|extensible than XHML|micorformats.” (See this comment for an example.)

I agree completely. I don’t think XHTML is nearly as expressive as RDF and Friends.

The problem with such arguments is that they seem to make the power or expressiveness of a particular technology the most important factor, whereas I believe the Web is a platform for *people* to be expressive. So the measure should not be “how expressive is this technology?” but “how much does this encourage and facilitate personal expression?”*

Why?

power != utility

Usefulness is more important than power and we must walk the fine line between power and usability, which is probably exponentially harder than either of the component problems.

Notes

  • I do realize that much of the Web (esp. in this Web 2.0 world), is for machine consumption, not human. Yet, I think comprehensibility is still vital(see my comment here). For example, how many people learned HTML by viewing other people’s source? Comprehensible technologies enable innovation.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 13th, 2005 at 9:40 am.

7 Responses to “Folow up on Microformats”

  1. The Community Engine Blog Says:
    April 14th, 2005 at 5:01 am

    Web 2.0 — machines and people with xhmtl microformats to bind them

    Web 2.0 is emerging from individual’s ability to create with technology. Xhtml microformats help by bridging the human-technology gap.

  2. Paul M. Jones Says:
    April 14th, 2005 at 5:14 am

    Ryan — agree, agree, and agree. Well said, sir, especially the points about utility and comprehensibility.

  3. Vidar Hokstad Says:
    April 14th, 2005 at 8:36 am

    Ryan, I can’t agree. How many percent of internet users understand HTML? 1%? 0.1%? HTML is successful because it is simple and compelling enough for a small group of people to create tools that have become killer apps.

    Most of the people who write HTML by hand doesn’t even understand it properly, but they can still use it because there are enough resources out there to let them do what they need to do.

    The thing is, very few people will ever need to know how to write OWL ontologies or how to generate valid RDF – most people will only ever need to know how to use tools that produce or consume RDF, or cut and paste snippets of RDF found in online resources.

    It’s not as if the complexity of Microsoft Word documents have prevented word processing from being used by the masses, or the complexity of the MP3 file format have stopped that from being used.

    If the need is there, tools will be produced to let users manipulate the data. Just look at the popularity of RSS. How many “normal” users will ever hand generate RSS or write code to generate or parse RDF? A vanishingly small percentage.

  4. ryan Says:
    April 14th, 2005 at 10:19 am

    Vidar:

    You say: “The thing is, very few people will ever need to know how to write OWL ontologies or how to generate valid RDF…”

    Funny, I’m pretty sure that similar things were said about HTML.

    Though it may seem counterintuitve, it seems that people learn HTML best by looking at the source, not the WYSIWYG representation of it. I agree that only a minority of people will need to really grok RDF in order for us to make it useful. But lets do the math…. supposing its 1% of Internet users (just random conjecture)– then I think that’d be about 8M people. I doubt that many people will ever grok it.

  5. Denis de Bernardy Says:
    April 17th, 2005 at 4:41 am

    the thing that really troubles me with these ideas is that they are immediately diverted from their original use.

    take these comments i spotted a month ago, on how tags and taxinomies are turning the web into chaos:

    Joshua Schachter: “One of the most popular tags created on the bookmarking service is ‘to_read,’ a tag attached to links of pages users want to remember to read.”

  6. ryan Says:
    April 17th, 2005 at 10:30 am

    Denis:

    Are you saying the Web isn’t already chaos?

  7. a work on process Says:
    April 21st, 2005 at 6:40 am

    Microformats and extensibility

    I’ve been following the chatter over microformats (XFN, xFolk, hCalendar, and their kin) for some time, but having been having a hard time formulating a response to all the discussion. In particular, the discussion over at Ryan’s blog and some postin…