Development:Planning:Microformats
Contents
Microformat Discovery
Background
Microformats are a collection of standards or conventions for marking up data with XHTML to allow that data to be more findable and reusable. Examples include hcard for marking up contact information and hcalendar for marking up events. That data can then be extracted from the HTML document via XSL, dom manipulation or other method and repurposed or exported into other applications (like iCal or AddressBool.app) or saved in some intermediate format.
Microformats aren't a new technology or other datatype embedded via XL nsamespaces or other method. All the magic is done via XHTML attributes (class, rel, title). This simple hcard creation tool provides a good visual example of how this works at the markup level.
Where Camino fits into the picture is up for discussion, but some form of discovery of formats is the first goal followed closely behind by export or hand off to other tools, or in some cases handing inside of Camino itself.
Links
- Jon Hicks blog post on safari plugin ui proposal
- Tails Firefox extension
- Microformats.org wiki UI discussion -- collection of links to other implementations and discussions
Microformats List
For starters, here's a list of different accepted and/or proposed microformats. Each type of data should be discssed somewhat independantly in terms of what handling (if any) is done inside camino
Specifications
- hCalendar
- hCard
- rel-license
- rel-nofollow
- rel-tag
- VoteLinks
- XFN
- XMDP
- XOXO
Drafts
- adr
- geo
- hAtom
- hResume
- hReview
- rel-directory
- rel-enclosure
- rel-home
- rel-payment
- Robots Exclusion
- xFolk
Initial Brain Dump by User:ChrisCasciano
There are a lot of items listed above, all in various states of stability and implementability, but I see them generally breaking down into three categories:
- Data you'd want to hand off to or export to another application (hcard, hatom, hcalendar)
- Data (or data elements) you may want the browser to do something with internally (XFN, rel-tag, rel-license XOXO)
- Data that isn't helpful to a user, but directed more at spiders or other consuming applications (hresume or hreview in whole parts, no-follow)
What I think is essential at this state in planning the Camino support for Microformats is the following:
- Deciding what formats to support
- Nailing detection of the formats chosen
- Deciding what to do with that infomation (e.g. exporting a vcard vs. trying to pass calendar info directly to iCal)
- Developing some clean UI that makes it all work without getting in the way
I think a good place to focus (as the others form the links already have) are with support for detecting and handing off hcard, hcalendar and hatom formats and looking at new UI / context menu items for enhancing the link types like rel-tag, rel-license and XFN
In the end, the process can probably take a lot from the feed discovery bits, though there will surely be some differences in UI both in selection and in handing off the item to other applications.
