Comments on: Microformats: inline annotation vs. binding

By: Phil Wilson

Phil Wilson — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 11:49:17 +0000

I totally forgot before, but it might be worth keeping an eye on http://microtemplates.org/ which is an IBM project for binding presentation (but also potentially meaning) to microformats using JSON.

By: Phil Wilson

Phil Wilson — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 21:48:44 +0000

“But maybe in the general case it is more useful to consider microformats as annotations, because the microformat is just an overlay. When microformats are used alongside some external model (e.g. with GRDDL), then there is a binding (with RDF).”

By: Danny

Danny — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 15:16:04 +0000

Interesting question. I think Phil’s right about there being a qualitative difference between the use of things like the HTML class attribute for style selection and their use in microformats. But it does seem quite blurred.

There is a kind of binding used with microformats already – the profile URI identifies the microformat in use, and the individual annotations are interpreted with reference to that. When CSS is applied you get a projection of the content that is a view, when the microformat interpretation is applied you get a projection that is a bunch of structured data.

But maybe in the general case it is more useful to consider microformats as annotations, because the microformat is just an overlay. When microformats are used alongside some external model (e.g. with GRDDL), then there is a binding (with RDF).

By: Dan Sickles

Dan Sickles — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 04:03:29 +0000

XBL appears to be more for behavior binding but perhaps something similar could work for content:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xbl/xbl.html

By: Phil Wilson

Phil Wilson — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 20:06:49 +0000

If I’m reading you correctly, which I’m not sure I am, then I think the analogy of CSS is a bad one.

In CSS you use selectors to bind (X)HTML elements to style rules. With microformats the selector *is* the rule in that the value of the class attribute defines the precise semantic meaning of the element and/or its contents, and so such a separation isn’t really possible (it’s possible there are one or two edge cases where it *might* apply however, such as dates, times and mf reference and embedding).

Returning to your first question: you decide on inline vs. binding exactly by how much “separation of …” you want and how much presentation you want embedded in your data. In the same way, you have to decide on how you write your JavaScript – do you inline it in the page, or use unobtrusive JS techniques to put it somewhere else and bind it at page display time?

I look forward to being told I’m talking rubbish :)