Copying the entire post from Microcontent Musings: Danny Ayers decides in the second round that MicroFormats are a good thing. But he says that they are mainly good from the publishers side of things and not the consumers side. Sort of why it makes a bad thing for me. MicroContent formats should be mainly for re-use. That is how the MicroWeb will be built. It should be machine readable. Also embedding MicroContent in a lot of other stuff makes life only more difficult. There should be a pure solution without all the mark-up riffraff.
As a publisher I'm trying to support everything I see. I don't know what the answer to the microcontent format problem is, but I don't want to engage in a format war. I'm interested in seeing what a "pure solution" looks like without "all the mark-up riffraff". Clearly we're not going back to an EDI type of text format. XML seems to me to be the right type of technology. Embedding in html allows leveraging of existing spiders, aggregators, etc, but I tend to agree that there could be something more of a pure solution across the wire. To me an extension to RSS 2.0 makes sense. What I've tried to do with the entrydata namespace is emulate the name/value form method of the web, but this has limitations.
XML Schema gives enough flexibility for users to define whatever they want to define. The problem is with support. Two pieces are missing. First, we need XML Schema-to-html renderers. Apache Cocoon is the closest with its cforms effort. Second, we need a storage methodology to keep the data. There are some XML databases out there. It could be stored on the filesystem. There are more options in this storage issue.
To me the format needs to have two parts: a core and the extended data. The core is the baseline set of things that comprise a weblog entry. And we have it already... it's RSS. The extension is what's being discussed... how is it placed? What is the method? Etc.
Interesting. Would it be good for reger.com to step out with yet another microcontent format? I don't know. I think that after years of dealing with user-defined data we have some good ideas on how to deal with it. At the same time I don't want to muddy the waters.
Oh, and the reality-Joe knows that Structured Blogging already has enough momentum that it'll probably become the standard. And it's a strong concept based on XML Schema. With one or two tweaks I think it'll work very flexibly and powerfully.
One thing I'm seeing is that people are creating single-purpose microformats like hreview and neutrinoxml. Somebody needs to crack the nut for everybody. Reger.com allows users to create ad-hoc microcontent formats. They're publishing these microcontent formats to RSS and embedded in HTML in two ways (Structured Blogging and RSS). Right now. So the formats are getting out there. What we need is a common way to describe these new formats. The format definition technology needs to be one layer up.
That's all the rambling I've got for now. Always glad to see the discussion happening out there. Lots to be done. Hoping reger.com can play a role.
Post-Ironman Melancholy