史蒂文 :: Release 2.0

There has been quite a few emails back and forward today between myself and others on the Microformats mail list. I like the concept of Microformats, mainly because they are likely to narrow the gap between those of us living in the purist Semantic Web world and those who actually create the data (typically not the same thing).

Almost anyone can create a Microformat. Creating an Xml Schema or RDF/OWL can be quite tricky and it's one explanation as to why markup rests almost exclusively on the shoulders of XHTML and RSS on the web.

I do believe that some of the problems of Xml Schemas and related formats in the post has been over engineering of the requirements, so much so that it becomes too difficult to just get started. The W3 did a good job in creating Primers for Xml Schema - but the Primer is 77 pages long and so before you can even start creating your own Xml formats, you have to read 77 pages.

HTML on the other hand is basic and fairly well known and adopted. It's also pretty flexible and supported well by numerous tools. So you have no real learning curve there. Then populating Microformats is pretty easy. Putting them in HTML documents is very easy too.

They really are a good start for building a real Semantic Web, so fingers crossed that the community and tools see the potential for making information more accessible across the board.