http://microformats.org/
This is a open standards approach to creating human readable semantic
data formats lead by Technorati and in particular Tantek Çelik (he
who designed the Mac IE rendering engine and a big standards fan) and
Dan Cedarholm of http://simplebits.com/ (who's one of the best and
most knowledgeable designers going IMHO).
"Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a
set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely
adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today,
microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to
current behaviors and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging)."
What's interesting about it is that it uses XHTML as the standard for
data so, for example, instead of a vCard like this...
BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:3.0
N:Çelik;Tantek
FN:Tantek Çelik
URL:http://tantek.com/
ORG:Technorati
END:VCARD
You get...
<div class="vcard">
<a class="url fn" href="http://tantek.com/";>Tantek Çelik</a>
<div class="org">Technorati</div>
</div>
Which means you can plop it straight into a web page and style it.
There's standards for vCard, iCalendar, reviews, tags and evolving
standards for many other common data formats.
Perhaps we should adopt this approach and use microformats throughout
phpWebSite ?
Shaun
aegis design - http://www.aegisdesign.co.uk
aegis hosting - http://www.aegishosting.co.uk
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