Comments on: Richard MacManus gets microformats wrong

By: The imminent rise of Microformats at FactoryCity

The imminent rise of Microformats at FactoryCity — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 07:17:15 +0000

[...] ix ‘06 keynote, Ray Ozzie pimping them at ETECH, LinkedIn coming to the party, folks misrepresenting core ideas already… I mean sweet! [...]

By: Richard MacManus

Richard MacManus — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 10:14:24 +0000

Fair point about rss polling, but really (to borrow Dave Winer’s slipped note to John Markoff recently) “it doesn’t have to be adversarial.” XML has wormed its way into HTML, via XHTML, so the two (xml and html) complement each other well. Sure you can add semantics to html to make the world, er I mean Web, a better place. But xml, rss etc are going to be increasingly important in the future Web (he says, neatly avoiding using the ‘2.0′ term). Babel schmabel…

And yes, this would’ve been far more entertaining on supr.c.ilio.us - although when I first read this post I thought the Snark Factor was present (”Use the Snark, Ryan… uuuuse the snark.”) :-)

By: ryan

ryan — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 06:17:53 +0000

Matt-

Granted that most web resources are produced with a CMS, there’s still more people who know HTML than XML.

Phillip-

You say:

The plugins *also* publish the source XML, which is used internally to edit and format the post, but it’s intended as a fallback for the case that no microformatted output is available, rather than as the only way to get at the data.

I’m sorry, I’ve conflated Structured Blogging, the formats (as they were originally positioned) and Structured Blogging, the tools. I was talking about the former, but obviously not being clear.

Richard-

You say: Around 70% of my site traffic is RSS,, but I think that misses the point.

First of all, I was talking in terms of numbers of resources, not numbers of requests, which is the important measure in terms of authoring.

Secondly, the higher proportion of RSS traffic is a result of how RSS is used. If HTML were polled regularly, the proportions would be different.

You also say: XML and its dialects.

See, one of the problems with XML-on-the-web are the dialects. See Tantek’s Tower of Babel Problem for more explanation.

I know I might be sounding a bit idealistic to suggest that people can actually use a shared vocabulary, but that how the web works.

Maybe it would have been more fun if I’d posted about this on supr.c.ilio.us.

By: Richard MacManus

Richard MacManus — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 03:55:49 +0000

You are correct to say it should read (X)HTML rather than XML in that last quote. Thanks for alerting me to that oversight, I’ve corrected it now in my post.

On your point about XML, I would counter that RSS and Atom are XML dialects and so in those terms XML has most certainly become the lingua franca on the Web. Around 70% of my site traffic is RSS, for example. I’m not saying HTML still isn’t really important, perhaps still moreso than XML, but I do think the future of data formats on the Web is XML and its dialects (esp. RSS/Atom).

By: Phillip Pearson

Phillip Pearson — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 03:25:09 +0000

Obligatory note: Structured Blogging certainly does not ignore HTML: the plugins use microformats (mainly hReview and relLicense at this point, but also stuff like COinS, an ISBN lookup microformat from the academic community) to mark up quite a few things in the HTML output.

There are still bits and pieces that aren’t marked up as fully as they could be, but that’ll improve when we get around to doing another big chunk of work on the plugins, or if anyone in the user community wants to download our code and fix up the templates to support whatever’s current in the microformat world. Whichever comes first :-)

The plugins *also* publish the source XML, which is used internally to edit and format the post, but it’s intended as a fallback for the case that no microformatted output is available, rather than as the only way to get at the data.