A Little Bit of Guidance

[Sagi]

Hi group,

I feel that it may be beneficial to the group if some of the more
experienced among us could provide a high-level outline of the steps
necessary to design a new format.

I (and perhaps others in the group) know what microformats are and how
to integrate them into the code, but I do not know enough about the
process for defining them. I think that will really help move the
conversation along and give our discussion a little more focus.

Thoughts?

[ja...@scrugy.com]

Sagi wrote:
> I feel that it may be beneficial to the group if some of the more
> experienced among us could provide a high-level outline of the steps
> necessary to design a new format.

Designing a new microformat, say hWine, should ultimately be done
through the microformat design process (see
http://microformats.org/wiki/process). However, this is not for the
faint of heart. The microformat group is justifiably very protective of
their specs and is wary of microformats becoming too complicated or
fragmented by problem domain (i.e. today hWine, tomorrow hBeer, and
hWhiskey after that).

As I have mentioned in other posts, there are some movements towards
defining an hItem or hProduct that has flexibility built-in to allow
for items/products such as wine to still have domain specific
properties. These efforts are meeting with some resistance, though.
Progress is still occurring but it's slow. A good approach for us might
be to get involved with one of these proposals and offer our insight
from the wine perspective to ensure they will work for us?

With that said, there are several existing microformats that can be
implemented today and be used to build interesting applications.
Although I'd like to be able to specify more wine details, Cork'd is
using the hReview microformat now with success. Wineries can also use
hCard, hCalendar, hListing, and geo for information displayed on their
websites.

-James