Raw

Danny, I'm far more cynical about microformats. The efforts I've looked at strike me as too loose and lightweight to be of much use, and I worry about what it will evolve into. I'm probably being offensive to someone (hopefully not you!), but I think that the whole trend may be just a bunch of backyard smelters.



As the "weave it in the presentation" microformats become more expressive and unambiguous, they will become more difficult to hand-code into rhtml, php, and what have you. The fact that the data is placed in html using rel and style tricks puts major inertia on improvements. Worst of all, developers won't want to add to the size of the page to be less ambiguous / more semantic.



I'd prefer that the next gen of browsers take advantage of "micro APIs" - much as blogging apps took advantage of the trackback APIs.



The obvious selling point for using APIs over on-page formats is that an API can accept a version number or other attribs to server the same data in different ways, allowing apps to offer more to the browser/aggregator over time through cleaner upgrades. Well, cleaner than wading through application tempates.



At the very laziest, metadata could be referenced in the html head, leading the client/spider to different pre-generated versions of the same data. Even if the end consumer is a human, the immediate consumer of the metadata is a machine.



- Jamie@en