Hello µF community,
I have been working on a particular problem and believe that the
creation or adoption of microformats would not only solve it, but be
of benefit to a great many web developers and help push the adoption
of microformats within enterprise companies.
The generic use case I have is quite simple:
1. Large company buys an expensive Web Analytics type product from a
vendor such as WebTrends, Omniture, Coremetrics or other (there are
lots of smaller vendors in the EU)
2. As part of the implementation the large company must add good
quality metadata to *every web page* on their site(s) to provide the
purchased product with enough information to exercise its many features.
Currently the common means of adding metadata to the web pages is
through proprietary and custom JavaScript mark-up that is time
consuming, error prone, opaque and expensive to manage for the large
company in question, e.g.
WT.pn = 'Homepage'; // WebTrends markup
s.pageName = 'Homepage'; // Omniture markup
pageTracker._trackPageview('/Homepage'); // Google Analytics
Until recently there was little incentive for the vendor companies to
improve on this, as the custom mark-up and its implementation provided
a barrier to product switching and generated revenue through
implementation consulting.
I've been lurking here for quite a while, and 18 months ago I was able
to start working full-time on better solutions for these product
implementations and soon came to the conclusion that microformats were
the way to go. I have a post outlining this thinking in more depth here:
<https://jshub.org/blog/2009/10/19/designing-hpage/>
We setup <http://jshub.org/> to promote this and other ideas to
improve quality of data collected on web sites, and also to put the
declaration of this data back into the hands of the content creators,
avoid side-channels and establish new best practices in a similar way
as current SEO and Accessibility techniques evolved. The idea here is
to encourage the publishing of semantic content that is measurable by
design.
One of our primary projects at jsHub.org is to establish a vendor
neutral format for the data mark-up (and the Open Source tools to
support it) and we have received very favourable feedback from all the
vendors we have met with, including the biggest vendors (WebTrends,
comScore, Coremetrics, Google) on the use of microformats.
As part of this consultation we published a draft microformat we
called 'hPage' (not to be confused with an earlier proposal to this
list by the same name):
<https://jshub.org/hPage/>
This proposal was developed using the published microformats process
as much as possible, and it has always been our intention to share it
with the microformats community for review and refinement and develop
a final specification that can be adopted.
I apologise in advance for the initial unilateral development and
labelling of this draft as a 'microformat', our circumstances have
been very much the same as that of hNews, and I would like to ask for
any and all feedback on the current proposal, and to start
transferring our research and other content to the official
microformats wiki for further development.
There are a number of initial questions that I believe I can anticipate:
1. We understand that this may never be a 'proper' microformat - our
usecase is rather generic, but the implementation of a solution has
specific constraints to be commercially viable. I and the other
members of the jsHub.org team have a lot of experience in this due to
previous work for the vendors (which we will be sharing), however I
would like to point out the 'Design principles' section of the spec
where we attempt to address some of the conflicts in approach and how
we try to mitigate them:
<https://jshub.org/hPage/#design_principles>
2. Its called 'hPage' to create an association with the Web Analytics
vendors measurement of a 'Page View', which is the primary use of the
proprietary mark-up it is intended to replace. May vendors have an
enormous number of potential variables that can be set for use across
a large product range and we don't believe that one microformat can
replace all of these, only a common subset. We expect that there will
be additional proposals needed, but we are starting with the most
obvious current practice and trying to address the next required
development in the Web Analytics industry - that of tracking multiple
pages of content in one document (AJAX updates). This is covered in
the section:
<https://jshub.org/hPage/#multiple_pages_of_content_in_a_single_html_document
>
3. As with hNews we suspect that there are potential benefits to
integrating with or extending hAtom and other microformats and would
like to first start with seeing how we can revisit our initial in-the-
wild examples using your collective experience. Our objective is to
establish 'a' microformat, not necessarily 'our' microformat for use
by clients and vendors alike.
We are working full-time on this and other related projects at
jsHub.org and I appreciate your time and am very much looking forward
to hearing your opinions.
[If anyone is London, UK based I am generally out and about if you
would like to meet up]
Liam Clancy
--
http://jshub.org/
http://metafeather.net/
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