Hi Folks, Michael Crichton says: "The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance." One of the keys to distinguishing information from disinformation is to have a clear understanding of the assumptions an author is making. Typically, it takes a great deal of effort to distill an author's assumptions. Bring clearly to light the assumptions being made would go a long way towards facilitating a web of trust.
I propose an hArgument Microformat with two properties: hArgument assumption (repeatable): a statement of what the author assumes to be true, and upon which his/her conclusion follows. [If it can be demonstrated that the assumption is false, then the conclusion is invalid] conclusion (repeatable): a statement that derives from the assumption(s) Example: below is an example of an argument. The argument can be immediately discredited because the assumptions can be shown to be fallacious: <p class="hArgument"> <span class="assumption">Microformats are a disruptive technology</span> <span class="assumption">Microformats are attempting to supplant XML documents with HTML and XHTML documents</span> <span class="assumption">The main benefit of Microformats is that it allows graceful degradation</span> <span class="conclusion">Microformats go too far.</span> <span class="conclusion">It's almost better to use a more suited format in such cases</span> </p> The advantage of this is that there is no need to "guess" what are the author's assumptions. They are clearly identified. Use Cases: any web page that tries to convince you of something. The examples are endless. Comments? /Roger _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss