First, go and read Bob Wyman’s (of PubSub) comment to my post. He has a lot of interesting things to say, and makes valid points. So don’t just take my word, read his side first.
Structured Blogging is a thing you do. Microformats are just one of the things that might result from your doing Structured Blogging. x-subnode might be there too. Who cares.
That, of course depends on who you ask. I don’t think you’ll get mindshare with the users. The people I know care about buying stuff they need, finding music they like, attending interesting events. For them reviews and listings are a way to get there. StructuredBlogging is two degrees from what’s on their mind. On the other hand, if you’re focusing on technologists, on the people who build tools, setup services, then you’re talking to me. And it so happens that if I have to implement it, I care about the choice of technology.
As you seem to recognize yourself, the scope of microformats is limited to the (large) realm of fairly simple tagging problems. On the other hand, if you want to do the kind of complex, many-fielded thing that is demonstrated in the wonderful but geeky reger.com screencast, you probably want something like x-subnode and XML as your format.
I buy the argument that Microformats don’t reach beyond a limited set of schemas. I blogged about that before, and I see the benefits in namespaces and schema that you get from X-Subnode. In fact, I like the way X-Subnode embeds XML in HTML. I don’t buy the argument that Microformats are hard to work with. If you use CSS to style them, then you already have the rules (CSS selectors) to parse them. I’ve done that, and it’s much simpler than parsing XML. Not to mention the error rate is lower.
Reading through the blogosphere, I found people who prefer Microformats, and those who think XML is better, even those who get turned on by RDF. As technologists, we all have our preferences, and damn if my VIM is not better than your Emcas :-) After 6 years of developing XML-based technologies, I still haven’t warmed up to the idea of XML-driven content editors. If you’re trying to be good at everything, you end up being good at nothing. I watched the screencast, but I still don’t understand: what is it good for? Why should I care?
And that’s where it all starts and ends. Use cases. Everyone I talk to wants to see something done around reviews and listings and events. So we have the use cases and now we just have to pick the technology. And we can argue Microformats vs X-Subnodes because we know what we’re delivering for. Not to mention, we can worry less about overlapping formats and more about the user experience. Because, quite frankly, the SructuredBlogging plugging is not a compelling UI, and I’m being civil here.
Right now I’m working on revising a WP plug-in into something that is sleeker, easier and I enjoy using. And I only have time to pick up one format. Which one should I use?
Bob Wyman
Assaf