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Independent Data and Formatting with Microformats

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Tue Jul 11, 2006 06:21 PM
from the web-fun dept.
Software The Internet
IdaAshley writes to tell us IBM DeveloperWorks is running an article about how to best utilize microformats to embed data within standard XHTML code. From the article: "Microformats are a pragmatic approach to solving the issue of structured data on the Web. Is it as architecturally pure as XML-encoded data separated from its formatting through a mechanism such as XSLT style sheets? No. But I think this approach is a realistic middle step that will help build a more intelligent Web that is easier to use and provides better search and data integration."
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  • Geez, man... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Chysn (898420) on Tuesday July 11 2006, @06:26PM (#15702257)
    Some of us have been doing this for YEARS. At least now we have a buzzword for it.
    • I just wrote a Java program to do all that in one step last week. I even took it a step further and used the Sun classes for parsing HTML and Xerces for XHTML. Anyone who has ever had to do a datamining project knows how to do this. I don't really think this is a big deal at all. Just another excuse to apply a Web 2.0 buzzword to a technique that's been around for quite a while. Tutorials on the web these days are getting to be pretty lame. Maybe I'll write a couple myself, at least I have the chance
    • Mixing presentation and data - good... bad... good. But it gets better a little, each time (maybe more of a spiral than a wheel).

      We're using them on aim pages [aimpages.com] for module development (I cover it a bit here [kotay.com]). Its a nice simple standard, and the idea needed SOME name - don't make more of it than it its.
      -----
      graphically speaking [kotay.com]

    • Re:Geez, man... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by frisket (149522) <peter@silmBLUEaril.ie minus berry> on Wednesday July 12 2006, @04:10PM (#15708441) Homepage
      Some of us have been doing this for YEARS. At least now we have a buzzword for it.

      There is already a buzzword: tag abuse. It's the last resort of the untalented.

      This particular version is known as semantic imputation (giving things meanings they don't inherently have). It's neither new, special, exciting, nor useful, but at least we now know how little the people at IBM and Leverage Software know about markup and XML.

      I guess I'd better add a warning to the XML FAQ [silmaril.ie] about it...

  • LISP (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 11 2006, @06:56PM (#15702400)

    I'm sure the LISP community would love to hear about this brand-new idea of embedding specialy, or domain-specific if you will, languages and data. How extraordinarilly novel.

    You'll be running a limited LISP implementation on every browser in no time!

  • Standardization is the problem (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 11 2006, @07:02PM (#15702433)
    This suffers from the same thing XML did. Remember when XML was going to revolutionize communication between computers by structuring everything consistently? Then <lname> tripped over <lastname> which was crawling on the floor after being decked by <name last="Henry"/> who was rather pissed off after an argument with <name><last>Henry</last>&lt/name> and the whole thing went down in a pile of flames and is now relegated to being a 2MB configuration parsing library to embrace and extend "option=value".

    So now why is this "vevent" class special, and who decided it would be "vevent" and not "scheduledevent" or "calendarevent" or "microsoftcalendarhassomethingforyoutodotoday"? Clearly as a human I can look at "dtstart" and think about it and realize that this means the starting date, but how does a computer know this? If the "semantic web" is going to take off, then we need semantics, and pronto.

    Hopefully any standardization doesn't turn into a nightmare though. I used to develop in the healthcare insurance claims field, and the old NSF format for transmitting an insurance claim electronically was a horrible death-by-committee piece of work. It was as if nobody could come to a consensus and the committee decided to just throw everything in. You might look at your insurance card and think "gee I have an insurance ID number" but no, in the NSF, there were about 10 different blanks for insurance IDs, depending. Is it a Medicare number? Then it goes in the Medicare blank. God forbid the computer would have just one blank and assume that if you're billing Medicare then the number in the blank is probably a Medicare ID. Medicare was easy, there's just one. Medicaid in most states have a billion subcontractors, all with names that have nothing to do with "medicaid" so you simply had to maintain a magic list of insurance plans that changed every other year or so that used the Medicaid ID field. Or the separate fields for Blue Cross and Blue Shield. What about the states where you have BCBS as a single entity?

    Anyway, I'm digressing (and ranting about a chunk of my ilfe I'd much rather forget). What's important in standardizing in semantics is identifying everywhere where things are identical and reusing semantics whenever possible. Decisions have to be made up front as to what is the relationship between "name" and "last name" (people have a name, which has a last name, yet companies have names that typically don't have a last name. What about a cat named "John K. Wibblesworth" how is that different from one named "Tama"?) Yet, take dtstart which is used here for a calendar event. Should we have "dtclassstart" for the first day of school?

    • Re:Standardization is the problem (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Bogtha (906264) on Tuesday July 11 2006, @07:14PM (#15702485)

      Remember when XML was going to revolutionize communication between computers by structuring everything consistently?

      No. I do remember how a lot of clueless PHB-types ran around telling everybody that though. XML solves the parsing problem, not the semantics problem. It's languages built on top of XML that handle semantics.

      XML was never meant to solve the problem you are talking about. Parsing markup into a tree is a totally different concept to figuring out what the stuff in the tree means. The only people who ever thought XML had something to do with what you say were totally clueless about XML.

      So now why is this "vevent" class special, and who decided it would be "vevent" and not "scheduledevent" or "calendarevent" or "microsoftcalendarhassomethingforyoutodotoday"?

      It's special because it appears in the hCalendar specification [microformats.org]. The people who wrote the specification decided it would be "vevent". They intend to submit it to a standards body.

    • Who else read this:

      If the "semantic web" is going to take off, then we need semantics, and pronto.

      as:

      If the "semantic web" is going to take off, then we need semantics, and porno.

    • Re:Standardization is the problem (Score:5, Informative)

      by TedTschopp (244839) on Tuesday July 11 2006, @07:53PM (#15702642) Homepage
      So now why is this "vevent" class special, and who decided it would be "vevent" and not "scheduledevent" or "calendarevent" or "microsoftcalendarhassomethingforyoutodotoday"?

      The idea is to leverage standards that are already out there, and in this case it would be the iCalendar standard.

    • Decisions have to be made up front as to what is the relationship between "name" and "last name" (people have a name, which has a last name, yet companies have names that typically don't have a last name. What about a cat named "John K. Wibblesworth" how is that different from one named "Tama"?)

      And how do you classify people who have just one name, like "Virgil?" I don't mean "Virgil Williams" or "Andrew Virgil," just "Virgil." Is that his first name, last name or something else altogether?

      The problem wit

    • This suffers from the same thing XML did. Remember when XML was going to revolutionize communication between computers by structuring everything consistently?

      Yeah. It works when you use the same DTD, which was the promise. It's not XML's fault that you and your supplier can't get your ducks in a row. The purpose of XML is to provide a medium that two ends can use to standardize a communications format of their own design, while giving a regular form to said formats so that arbitrary formats could be supported by arbitrary tools. It fulfills this ideal quite well, as anyone even vaguely familiar with web standards knows. It is not meant to magically merge two inconsistent standards.

      Then <lname> tripped over <lastname> which was crawling on the floor after being decked by <name last="Henry"/> who was rather pissed off after an argument with <name><last>Henry</last>&lt/name>

      Yeah. And that's XML's fault how? Get a DTD and stick to it.

      and the whole thing went down in a pile of flames

      Yeah, essentially every office suite, database, most graphics editors, many layout programs, and quite a few games support XML. Jabber / Google Chat run on XML. The web is built on an SGML dialect, which is largely being converted into an XML dialect; XML is itself an SGML dialect. Web 2.0 (god I hate that name) is an outcropping of XML's parsability. XML is so useful that Microsoft was able to use it to ward Massachusettes' lawsuits off. The United Nations now releases their transcripts solely in XML. XML is now the second most pervasive data storage format on earth, after CSV/TSV, and it's gaining fast. (Don't bother saying SQL - it's an API, not a storage format.)

      Exactly what is your definition of "going down in flames" ?

      and the whole thing went down in a pile of flames and is now relegated to being a 2MB configuration parsing library to embrace and extend "option=value".

      Uh, TinyXML has a footprint of 40k, champ. Also, that's not what "embrace and extend" means.

      So now why is this "vevent" class special, and who decided it would be "vevent" and not "scheduledevent" or "calendarevent" or "microsoftcalendarhassomethingforyoutodotoday"?

      What a surprise, the guy who couldn't standardize on a DTD now fails to understand other format standardizations. Read the article, champ. It's not SlashDot's job to read for you, and this one's honestly pretty simple. Indeed, the specific purpose of microformats is to address your whining, but you don't see the point. Cough.

      Clearly as a human I can look at "dtstart" and think about it and realize that this means the starting date, but how does a computer know this?

      Er, by supporting a specific microformat. Are you putting in effort to be dense? It's the same way they support iCal, or MS Word files, or in fact any format at all, ever.

      If the "semantic web" is going to take off, then we need semantics, and pronto.

      This has nothing to do with the semantic web. You want to drop another? Ontological Web Language sounds important too. Use that one more often: fewer people will see through you.

      God forbid the computer would have just one blank and assume that if you're billing Medicare then the number in the blank is probably a Medicare ID.

      Yes, I'm sure the people billing Medicare who aren't using Medicare IDs will be greatly amused that your application just fails for them. Why is it that I don't believe you had much to do with the design of the system?

      What's important in standardizing in semantics is identifying everywhere where things are identical and reusing semantics whenever possible.

      "Semantics" aren't reusable. They're not arbitrarily applied. Please stop using words you fail to understand. Not every markup of data is semantic, even if the markup means something. Semantics are the work of understanding context, not identifying relations

      • " Then <lname> tripped over <lastname> which was crawling on the floor after being decked by <name last="Henry"/> who was rather pissed off after an argument with <name><last>Henry</last></name> "

        "Yeah. And that's XML's fault how? Get a DTD and stick to it."

        Well, actually, schema and RDF were supposed to address exactly that issue. So, in the opinion of the W3C, at least, it appears 'Get a DTD and stick to it' isn't the complete answer.

        But that's a simplistic

        • Yeah. And that's XML's fault how? Get a DTD and stick to it."

          Well, actually, schema and RDF were supposed to address exactly that issue.

          Schema is a replacement for DTD, because DTD has some subtle problems. RDF is actually for describing what's available on a service, not what's contained in one document; in a weird sort of way it's a conceptual parallel to the two for servers.

          That all said, it's worth noting that XML considers its data type as a critical and un-removable part of the document. So, sure,
        • DTDs provide structure but no meaning beyond what humans ascribe to it.

          Uh, yeah, that's because that's what they're for. I said the reason he didn't have structure was because he didn't provide an appropriate structure document. Now you're trying to rebutt me by saying that they're really only for structure.

          I fail to see the disconnect here.

          Likewise, you claim that meaning is not reusable and are not arbitrarily applied, yet you chose to define bug as a Volkswagon, rather than as a vehicle, car, or automo

  • I don't get it... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by grumbel (592662) <grumbel@gmx.de> on Tuesday July 11 2006, @07:27PM (#15702550) Homepage
    Ok, so this "microformats" thing is about encoding extra data inside an HTML file by abusing CSS class names for markup, isn't that completly unnecessary and nothing more than an ugly hack? Don't we have XML namespaces for exactly that reason? Wouldn't something like:

    <span style="display: none">
       <vevent:event>
         <vevent:dtstart>20060501</vevent:dstart>
         <vevent:dtend>20060502<vevent:dtend>
         <vevent:summary">My Conference opening</vevent:summary>
         <vevent:location>Hollywood, CA</vevent:location>
       </vevent:event>
    </span>

    We the 'right'[tm] way to day it?

    • Re:I don't get it... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Karma Farmer (595141) on Tuesday July 11 2006, @08:22PM (#15702741)
      The class attribute was never intended to be limited to CSS. From the HTML 4.01 specification:
      The class attribute... assigns one or more class names to an element; the element may be said to belong to these classes. A class name may be shared by several element instances. The class attribute has several roles in HTML:
      • As a style sheet selector (when an author wishes to assign style information to a set of elements).
      • For general purpose processing by user agents.
      • I don't believe it was intended to contain an alias (in Sowa's sense) or a general nomenclatura, however. This innovation actually undercuts the *semantic web* fairly radically, by confusing names with types, proper nouns with classes, as discussed in the second chapter of his Knowledge Representation.

        XML, as pointed out clearly elsewhere in the thread, is a conventional syntax for the representation of heterogeneous schemata. An XSL stylesheet is a deterministic means of defining the relationship betw
    • Your technique hides the semantic data from normal view and forces the author to replicate what they don't want hidden.

      With microformats, the data is presented once, with a few simple tags, and is then available to both HTML viewers/users and semantic parsers.

            • *Any* design activity is more complicated than copying a proven, open source design. And if you want that design to be understood by someone else, you still need to (correctly) use a common vocabulary.

              It is easier to use what you know (HTML+CSS) and rely on the technology you understand (IE/Firefox/etc). That's it. Some people like to play in new techno sandboxes. Others just need to publish their kid's soccer schedule on their webpage and aren't about to read the help files at their ISP--or sourceforge o
    • Well, actually it's what XHTML is for - namespaces are just to prevent name conflicts, like namespaces in C++. Sure, XML is for custom markup, but Microformats are about embedding formats, not creating them. It's a subtle, and some would contend, pointless difference; that said, given what you said, I'm willing to bet you'll see the importance.

      But, yes, you're right to point out that the buzzword web is reinventing yet another tool needlessly and badly.

  • History, failures, doomed to repeat (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ekhben (628371) on Tuesday July 11 2006, @09:20PM (#15702971)
    This is a kind of neat idea, except, of course, if I have CSS that does something with, oh, say, a class of "dtstart". Sure, it's easy to recognise that ".vevent > .url > .dtstart" is a microformat data item for an hCalendar, but if I'm already using "dtstart" or "url" regularly in my markup so I can apply styles to those kinds of things, I'm pretty much SOL. Rewrite all your markup and CSS to stop using those names.

    There's no namespacing. There's not even an ATTEMPT at namespacing. This will fast become an unmanageable hodge-podge of insanity, with common words used willy-nilly in class attributes.

    The class attribute is defined as CDATA. That's it. You can use pretty much ANY character in it. There's a lot of characters that can't be used in a CSS selector, though, such as ":". See where I'm going with this? &lt;div class="mf:vevent"&gt; for a start. Better yet, &lt;div class="hidden mf:vevent"&gt; such that you can hide (or format) the block of data separately.

    Now, as if that wasn't bad enough, and, trust me, it IS bad enough, there's also the misuse of the "title" attribute and the "abbr" element. A machine formatted date is not the expanded version of a human formatted date, which is not an abbreviation. A renderer trying to make sense of &lt;abbr class="dtstart" title="10034134134T00"&gt;17th Smarch&lt;/abbr&gt; will think "AHA! This here is an abbreviation, I will provide unto the user some means to see what that '17th Smarch' abbrevation stands for!" Usability disasters follow.

    So, in summary, this is the worst idea I've seen in HTML space since some bright spark said, "let's suggest that people use the 'text/html' content type for their XHTML markup!"

  • HoTMetaL (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Doc Ruby (173196) on Tuesday July 11 2006, @09:45PM (#15703063) Homepage Journal
    And I think that muddling data and presentation without explicit distinction is exactly what was wrong with HTML. Which we just spent a decade slightly recovering from. I guess IBM has made a lot of money on crappy tools, good tools to extract data from crappy data, and extra money for doing it right.
  • The VERY relevant site that Jack Herrington forgot to mention there is Pingerati [pingerati.net]. That is THE site through which all these Microformats are shared. The system is based on pings, much like the rest of the blogosphere. Both Pingerati [pingerati.net] and Microformats [microformats.org] have a major force behind it - Technorati [technorati.com].

  • We're looking to implement hResume on Emurse.com [emurse.com] web resumes here in the next couple of days.

    I'm really excited about being able to push the standard some. We've been wondering what the effects of it could be negatively though, in terms of screen scrapers (alex.emurse.com, for instance). Any one have any thoughts?

    We've built hResume support to be configurable by the user, if it proves to be an issue. Just wondering how we should initially offer it.

  • I Was Going To Say... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Carcass666 (539381) on Tuesday July 11 2006, @11:51PM (#15703437)

    I was going to say "I Don't Get It" but somebody beat me to it.

    I think the title of TFA "Separate data and formatting with microformats" is a bit ironic since it's about wedging your data into a web page in such a fashion that somebody might be able to pull it back out.

    If you want to make your data available there are all sorts of standard and more efficient ways of doing it than embedding it in the presentation layer. If somebody is going to all the trouble to create a parseable human-readable page, why wouldn't they go to about the same amount of trouble and make a far more efficient and standard RSS feed? What about the buzzword of the last few years, SOAP? Hell, what about XML?

    From TFA:

    How great is that? I have one script that reads a page with calendar items and exports it as XML. Then, I have another page that turns that XML back into calendar items. The original script can then read that page and come out with the same data. It's definitely a circular action.
    Okay, maybe it's not that great.
    I agree. This reminds me of the lame number tricks where you have somebody pick a number, add something, multiply it by something, blah blah blah, you take the result, divide it by 7 and then you give them their orignal number because you had it all set up ahead of time. If they screw up in their calculations, the trick doesn't work. In this thing, if you screw up embedding the text within the HTML (plenty of ways to do that), the trick doesn't work - and doesn't accomplish much even if it does.
  • Look into JSON..its basically javascript data structures that you eval on the client. Why bother assembling thick XML that needs to be parsed on the client. XML is slow, and even slower if you have to XSLT it out of the XHTML.

  • It appears you were thinking about the data URI scheme [wikipedia.org]. Unfortunately, and very much like modern CSS standards, the only browser to not support it is the one with the greatest market share.

    • They sort of have an "in-house" edition of Firefox that you can install through the IBM Standard Software Installer (or which you might get preinstalled on your ThinkPad). It's effectively the exact same thing, has a few extra search engines maybe (for searching the intranet, the internal "blue pages" directory, et cetera) and a little string in the window titlebar... maybe a few icons are different here and there...

    • Re:META headers (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 11 2006, @06:51PM (#15702379)

      Get off your hobby-horse, Jorn. At some point, please realise that you are clueless about markup. Only then will you be able to learn a bit about what you are so high-and-mighty about.

      Firstly, <meta> is an element type, not a header. It doesn't do your credibility much good when you don't even know what it is.

      Secondly, <meta> is an astonishingly limited element type. It's scoped to the page not particular parts of it, and it has a plain-text content model because it uses attributes instead of child elements.

      Thirdly, I anticipate you saying that you could fix this by changing the <meta> element type. Sure you could. You could fix it by changing it to a set of element types that describe content more accurately and changing it so that it could appear in other parts of the document. And you know what you'd have then? The structured HTML that you despise so much. That's right, microformats embody the very thing you are criticising.

      Finally, given that HTML hasn't changed recently to allow microformats, everything that is possible today with microformats was possible five years ago with microformats. It's a design strategy, not a new technology.

      Again, please learn a bit about something before you turn your nose up at it. You might be smart in other respects, but when it comes to markup, you are dumb. Please accept this so you can change it.

      • Get off your hobby-horse, Jorn

        Strangely enough, I just asked a question: "How much of this could have been done 5 years ago if the structured-HTML community hadn't blindly rejected META headers?"

        So if anyone is on a hobbyhorse, it's Mr Coward.

        It's scoped to the page not particular parts of it, and it has a plain-text content model because it uses attributes instead of child elements.

        So I guess I have to ask again: How much of microformats could have been done using META, given that it's scoped to

        • Re:META headers (Score:5, Informative)

          by Karma Farmer (595141) on Tuesday July 11 2006, @08:35PM (#15702796)
          How much of this could have been done 5 years ago
          All of it. Microformats use features introduced with HTML 4.0 in 1997, so all of this was possible nearly 10 years ago.

          How much of microformats could have been done using META
          None of it. META tags and microformats serve two entirely seperate purposes, and neither is in any way a replacement for the other.
          • How much of microformats could have been done using META... None of it.

            I just don't believe that. If you're describing one or more events, why can't you put most or all of those descriptions in META format?

            For me, the worstcase for the waste in rejecting META is that we could have been putting Yahoo/Dmoz categories there, all this time, but haven't been because the 'cult' didn't think it was fancy enough.

        • So I guess I have to ask again: How much of microformats could have been done using META, given that it's scoped to the page (which is no problem for the most important page semantics), and uses attributes?

          Very little. For instance -- if I had a full page calendar display -- because META is scoped to the whole page, I couldn't include an event record for each individual event -- I'd have to have the person go to a 'more information' link, and then give the event information. If I wanted them to do tha

          • I couldn't include an event record for each individual event

            I'm not convinced you've really tried-- suppose the METAs described an event1, an event2, etc, and whatever Firefox extension is tasked with extracting that info could look for flags in the body that show which event is described where?

            Microformats seem to be a classic 'bag taped to the side', because the logic of the semantic web was still poorly visualised when XML was selected. I'm just asking whether META doesn't deserve rehabilitation a

          • I personally didn't like the examples given in the IBM article

            Is that

            <abbr class="dtstart" title="20060501">May 1</abbr> -
            <abbr class="dtend" title="20060502">02, 2006</abbr>
            crap really the best they've got? It makes my eyes bleed...

            (Since the association between the human- and machine- readable texts is wholly imaginary, why not keep the machine vesion in META?)

    • It was all done 20 years before the web existed, as SGML. But thanks for playing.
    • The difference between this and text tagging is that this has a set structure.

    • Re:Tagging in Text (Score:5, Informative)

      by Mr_Tulip (639140) on Tuesday July 11 2006, @08:05PM (#15702676) Homepage
      The thing that makes Microformats stand out from homebrew versions is the attempt to standardize the formats, allowing others to easily work out what microformat you are using and integrate them into their own site.

      The article mentions the wiki [microformats.org], but doesn't link to it, except at the very bottom of the resources section.

      • I was like, "I do this every day", so what? I see from the Wiki that it's like RSS, and they are trying to standardize the formats. Thanks. Everything is getting closer to being truely useful every day.

    • I do like the idea of being able to move XML around without having to parse to view the basic file in a formatted fashion. So, you're mixing HTML with a tag. Again, SO WHAT? But what about the encapsulated text, what's the point?

      To make things application parsable. Try reading the article before complaining that you don't see the point.

      If you're going to use a viewer eventually

      If you'd bother to read the article, which is about comparing one application parsable format (iCal) to the new microformat, yo

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