DISQUS

DISQUS Hello! Life is grand is using DISQUS, a powerful comment system, to manage its comments. Learn more.

Community Page

Life is grand

Jump to original thread »
Author

Extending RSS and MicroFormats

Started by paulmwatson · 10 months ago

Whenever I read about someone proposing to add a dozen or more new elements to RSS I ask myself; why not use or propose a MicroFormat instead? It requires less tooling, fragile aggregators won’t choke on it, developers can innovate quicker without waiting for extensive RSS spec. ... Continue reading »

2 comments

  • Randy Charles Morin

    1 year ago

    I think hResume v HR-XML Resume XML best shows why new XML grammars are better than microformats. In order to build a hResume fragment, you have to understand how microformats work. With HR-XML, you just import the XSD into an XML editor and you can build it without ever seeing an angled bracket. Further, look at the depth of detail in HR-XML vs hResume. Many resume constructs can't even be expressed in hResume.
    reply
  • Paul Watson

    1 year ago

    I'm not sure powerful XML tools is a strong argument for XML grammars, especially in this case which isn't a consumer production play. I've used a few XML tools and they are not for the layman. The market still seems to center around purpose built applications which can then emit structured data.

    And for the kinds of companies wanting to use product meta-data in RSS the source would be a database and server-side application. Amazon and co. wouldn't change to XML tools just to get extra elements in an RSS feed and they wouldn't do it to get MicroFormats either. But the RSS producer should be easily configurable to insert the MicroFormat (and even extra RSS elements) from the product database.

    The benefit of the MicroFormat is to the end-user who doesn't need updated tools to gain the benefit of the extra data. In Google Reader it would just be HTML and to a machine it would be easily parsable data.
    reply

Add New Comment

Returning? Login