MicroFormats - any experience? any opinions?

Hugo wrote:Jor is it just

Posted: Tue, 2007-07-31 21:59

That's my feeling. The only opportunity I've had to use Microformats is marking up a hCard on my own site, but Brian Suda runs through a list of ways in which they can be used now and possibly in the future - http://www.sitepoint.com/article/microformats-meaning-markup

I've got to be honest. All

Posted: Wed, 2007-08-01 13:29

I've got to be honest. All these new buzzwords have got my head to spinning. Microformats, code behind, Ajax, Web 9.7...

... where to go from here? Who knows?

Ok, I'm waiting for

Posted: Wed, 2007-08-01 17:12

Ok, I'm waiting for your report on how to use microformats and why I should.

Hi To be honest I havn't

Posted: Sat, 2007-08-04 01:32

Hi
To be honest I havn't heard much about mico formats till a few weeks ago. But i've got to admit I love the idea. Just due to the fact that they will change the desciption text in the bookmark list is a really great idea. This keeps the booksmarks upto date which should help in click thoughs.

I hate it when i revisit a site from my bookmarks and find the information has changed.

But if i did see a change on one of my fav sites i probly would click though I mean you bookmark a site because you like it and if they have similar new content then i want to know.

Think of it as add marketing to already returning customers. Great concept in my opinion. I might change my mind when I get round to impelmenting them thou lol

I was checking them out and

Posted: Sat, 2007-08-04 01:46

I was checking them out and appaently one of the benifts is they update your bookmarks description if i'm wrong I appologise but i dont think i am as i was going though why use microformats and this was one of the reasons they gave i'll check the site out later and double check but i dont think i am.

If i am being a muppet and talking about something completly different sorry for the post you have me paroniod now. lol

Also check

Posted: Sat, 2007-08-04 02:09

Also check out
http://www.dvhardware.net/article16071.html
this is a bit more specific but I know you can do it or it will happen soon
phew I almost looked like an idiot you had me worried lol

Microformats don't have the

Posted: Sat, 2007-08-04 07:49

Microformats don't have the ability to auto update, Operator provides the ability to extract the information from say a vcard and to use it in a number of ways, if you have tagged the address lines with a parent class 'adr' then an option provided is to feed to Google Maps whereupon you will open a map straight to the address which is kind of neat, you can also extract the vcard info and save it to a file suitable for email client address books or directly into thunderbirds address book, however this function doesn't seem to match fields exactly placing url addresses under the home tab despite the fact that you have tagged the vcard as an 'org' (business) this seems to the case even if you test with one of the official examples which one would take to be correctly formatted; the bookmark function appears to a little odd in extracting all the vcard information and placing it under the description field in FF but I may have missed something there, despite my vcard supposedly being correct and valid, also despite all the functions of operator working in one mode when I switch to the user mode they grey out so is Operator buggy or have I done something incorrectly - it really isn't clear - but that is where one starts to loose too much time trying to figure out through trial and error.

The concept is a good one and no doubt it will expand and improve but at the moment it appears to have limited use. If you take 'Operator' out of the picture then it is difficult to figure out how to make use of the cards, Opera seems not - as yet? - to support them although opera developer makes use of them on their pages ? IE I think is supposed to be making plans to for IE8?

I've agreed that despite the time taken looking into these vs. benefit we might as well have them in place, but like a lot of emerging 'stuff' I've been mildly dissapointed in them and the fact that they are not quite as simple to write as they would have you believe with the parent child tagging and nesting being a tad confusing and crucial to how they work, and examples and guides don't quite go into sufficient detail on that, well at least not in baby speak that I can understand.

it's the fields that's

Posted: Sat, 2007-08-04 08:44

it's the fields that's throwing me somewhat but that's interesting that the label a such rather than the value is read I thought the point was that the classes were the field. I'm also confused by the class 'type' as a parent as that seems critical yet not clear in examples of correct usage.

Thanks for that tip I'll have to go back to the test page and play around it's perhaps part of the key to the url placement problem, which is minor but really bugging me.

Ah yes it's the use of the

Posted: Sat, 2007-08-04 09:53

Ah yes it's the use of the type class that's confusing as you do have specify after it as plain text certain seemingly set keywords which one would assume are just for display, I'm making a fundamental error in not using spans enough I think but I'm trying to work this into a ul list and although I've been playing with the type class clearly have been trying to do things that are throwing it out like nested ul.

I still have a sneaking suspicion that the fields such as url are a glitch and that contrary to the instruction that you can class the vcard as org rather than personal in using fn one fundamentally is always attempting to describe a person within a org

Your example helps though thanks!

I think I agree, what

Posted: Sat, 2007-08-18 09:50

I think I agree, what perturbed me initially (and still does) was/is the use of classes in this manner; I can see the point and the fact that an attempt has been made to make this an extremely simple thing to implement utilizing as it does markup that everyone is already familiar with.

I wasn't happy with the examples that used divs and spans to markup the information, and in trying to produce some more meaningful structure realized that it was in fact impossible to avoid the use of a large number of spans to section info but that also the 'type' class seemed to be a cumbersome approach relying as it does on a further span but requiring keywords to specify that sub type and those keywords are simply character data which would display. In attempting meaningful structure (in this instance nested uls) it became rapidly clear that the nested order and indeed the ordering of the class tags was far more important than the example guides/cheatsheets led you to believe and that it was all too possible to produce spurious results even though you had followed the technically correct syntax and grouping.

I had to do far more work than I wished as I already had a block of code to present visual contact info but then was asked to implement microformats so had the brain wave of extending the block to include all the vcard class tags and to then turn on or off the display of the classes, so that I had screen rendering, and a nice block of contact details to print out, but it was fiddly to get right, and much to my extreme angst and too much lost time found that it was impossible to get url addresses to place themselves under org details rather than personal in address book. What does work though and is very cool is to be able to link directly to a google map based on the address tags, but that requires the 'operator' plugin for FF and so far only FF seems to have this.

I agree with the concept emphatically we should be able to pull data in a variety of ways to suit different devices/apps yet I am not convinced by this particular implementation, then again I arrived, after some effort, at an outcome that works quite well but do wonder whether it oughtn't to be more along the lines of the ROR implementation

The install in question is a

Posted: Sat, 2007-08-18 11:00

The install in question is a default install of IE6 on Win XP, patched with all updates.

The trivial example page.

An image showing IE displaying the page and the xml and xslt sources. (The CSS hasn't been corrected for IE6 issues - hence differences between the rendered page in IE and other browsers).

(No subject)

Posted: Sat, 2007-08-18 12:03

So this

Posted: Sat, 2007-08-18 13:22

So this http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/xhtml-modularization-19990406/extending.html ?

Chris..S wrote:kk5st

Posted: Sat, 2007-08-18 21:14

I just looked again at my three year old xhtml example and its DOM. Were the <p> element replaced by, say, a <card> element, it would be trivial to extract whatever data you wanted, using semantic element markup.

What I was suggesting, so unclearly, was that a public DTD be developed with semantic elements. Where I hand extended the existing DTD, one could simply import a standardized extension. The elements would replace the microformat classes, making well structured, semantic markup a breeze.

Thanks to IE, we're left with a convoluted use of element attributes, or as you showed us, a hybrid of text/html + application/xml. Neither approaches the elegance afforded by eXtensibleHTML.

cheers,

gary