OK,
to follow up my recent post of things possibly worth responding to
from /. comments.
__
SDC: Some of us have been doing this for YEARS. At least now we have
a buzzword for it.
MFR: Indeed a lot of people have been doing this for years. The
problem is, they have been doing it independently, and so in
different ways. As a consequence, different people have their own way
of marking up the same kinds of content. Two recent surveys [1] [2]
discovered that the noise to signal ratio in the use of class and id
is so high that there is effectively no common semantics on the web
based on the use of these values. So we have been doing this for
years for little point.
One reason why microformats are valuable is the network effect which
comes when a large amount of data is marked up in the same way.
The commenter does emphasize an important aspect of microformats -
they seek to standardize current practice and behavior, rather than
invent new solutions to new problems. So it's a good thing some of us
have been doing this for years. Now we can all do it the same way and
really benefit from it.
[1] http://westciv.typepad.com/dog_or_higher/2005/11/
real_world_sema.html
[2] http://code.google.com/webstats/index.html
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