On 8/22/07, David Janes <davidjanes blogmatrix.com> wrote:
> On 8/21/07, Tara Hunt <horsepigcowgmail.com> wrote:
> > This is an awesome post and goes back to a
discussion I became very
> > frustrated in a while back:
>
> IMHO, the ideal state of the end user is they see (for
example) Tara's
> name on a webpage and they just click to copy the
microformat to their
> address book. Underneath, they don't care how all the
plumbing gets
> there to make this work, they just do the action.
>
> What will they call this action? When most people use
technology, it's
> all just magic words: TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, e-mail, hook
up the cable
> modem, push the brake peddle: simple invocations that
refer to using
> technology that underneath _they really have no idea
how it operates_.
> Our job as technologists is to make using microformats
as magical as
> that.
>
> As to nomenclature, "Microformats" is as good
a magic word as any
> other proposal I've heard, and probably better than
most.
I would agree with this. I also think, to this point, the
writer of
the post is probably not the ultimate audience of
microformats the
community-generated spec, but would be a consumer of the
benefits that
detection and support in the browser would bring.
Wherein lies the crux of that post and Tara's comment --
there is
still far too little benefits being derived from all the
advocacy work
that we've done to spread microformats in the wild. We may
be getting
somewhere with portable social networks and with the support
coming in
Firefox 3, and I do tend to take the long view with
microformats, but
I still feel like they're seen by many as novelty formats
with few if
any tactile benefits (filling up one's address book is
certainly
semi-magical when compared with the old copy each line, one
at a time,
method, but it's not exactly mind shattering).
Therefore, I think that this post serves to remind us that
our work
has only barely begun -- and that microformats are not yet
human
consumable because the interfaces to support leveraging
their presence
in webpages have not yet saturated our web tool
infrastructure.
We've made plenty of progress in a short amount of time but
I'm still
eagerly awaiting and anticipating when we change the pH
balance of the
web and everywhere you look there's an HTML-contained,
microformatted
data object waiting to be moved around seemlessly between
desktop and
web, between platform to platform, between client and
server, and from
person to person.
As I've said about something else recently, I don't think
that
"microformatting the web" is something that can be
achieved; I do,
however, think that it is a process and a mindset and an
approach to
solving large scale problems with the greatest amount of
benefit and
the most minute cost.
Ultimately microformats do not solve a technological
problem; they
work at solving a deeper and harder social and political
problem --
that is, the freedom and portability of our data... in order
to make
strides in that effort, we must change minds and help people
to
understand both the validity and importance -- and utility
-- of
ultimately having that kind of control and influence over
the data
that we create and discover.
Chris
--
Chris Messina
Citizen Provocateur &
Open Source Advocate-at-Large
Work: http://citizenagency.com
Blog: http://factoryjoe.com/blog
Cell: 412 225-1051
Skype: factoryjoe
This email is: [ ] bloggable [X] ask first [ ]
private
_______________________________________________
microformats-discuss mailing list
microformats-discussmicroformats.org
http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microforma
ts-discuss
|
