Macroformats
Elliotte Rusty Harold posts a critical review of the latest DevWorks Microformats article and I love every delicious second of it.
Do microformats really deliver on the promise of 80% of what’s good about XML? I’m not convinced. Seems that microformats are basically name/value pairs. A great (if somewhat anemic) solution for simple problems, but is that 80% of the decorated hierarchical structure provided by XML? I’m very skeptical.
Like Harold, I wonder why we can’t just use XML? Support is better, and the data model is richer. Why do we need microformats at all? They’re just a distraction with a pretty website.
To clarify… I don’t think the concept of microformats (inserting metadata into web pages) is a bad one… I just don’t think overloading HTML attributes with additional meaning in an attempt to validate pages against hoary old XHTML 1.0 DTDs is the right approach. The “X” in XML means extisible… let’s use that.