{"id":29,"date":"2007-09-03T16:49:57","date_gmt":"2007-09-03T20:49:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/2007\/09\/microformats-invert-assumptions\/"},"modified":"2007-09-03T16:52:42","modified_gmt":"2007-09-03T20:52:42","slug":"microformats-invert-assumptions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/2007\/09\/microformats-invert-assumptions\/","title":{"rendered":"Microformats Invert Assumptions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tantek \u00c7elik has thoughts on how microformats invert conventional approaches to problem-solving<\/a>. (He invented the term \u201cmicroformat,\u201d so you can call him an expert on the subject.)<\/p>\n

I want to talk about how the proposed bibleref microformat<\/a> follows each of the assumptions Tantek lists.<\/p>\n

\u201cSolve small specific problems rather than big problems\u2026. By focusing on those rather than the big hard problems we get more done, and we learn important lessons (and perhaps even create a few building blocks) that make solving the harder problems easier.\u201d<\/strong> An example of a big problem is the one posed by Axel<\/a> about book-chapter-verse references not being unique identifiers because of different versification schemes. To my knowledge, only Logos has solved this problem, and they need a 57-MB data backend<\/a> to support it. (57 MB != small problem.) It\u2019s great that Axel brought up this problem; it\u2019s an excellent one to solve, but it\u2019s beyond the scope of a microformat solution\u2014at least for now.<\/p>\n

\u201cResearch existing data publishing behaviors and data formats, and then base designs directly on that research, rather than inventing new technologies for new spaces.\u201d<\/strong> Online Bible-citing practices have pretty strong conventions, at least when they involve links to web Bibles: in general, either the reference itself is a link, or a word or phrase is a link. Bibleref handles both cases well. (The proposed specification doesn\u2019t work as well when the title<\/code> attribute of the <a><\/code> tag holds the text of the verse, as it sometimes does. I can\u2019t think of an elegant way to handle this case; Chris Roberts\u2019 WordPress plugin<\/a> adds an empty <cite><\/code> tag. Would it be better to wrap the <cite><\/code> tag around the <a><\/code> tag or pursue an alternate solution? Hard to say.)<\/p>\n

\u201cRe-use existing vocabularies where possible, rather than inventing your own vocabulary\/language (in contrast to XML culture).\u201d<\/strong> HTML has a built-in tag for handling citations (<cite><\/code>), and using the class<\/code> and title<\/code> attributes as bibleref does falls both within the letter and even the spirit of those attributes. In contrast, an alternative way of specifying a Bible references is to invent a new protocol (<a href="bibleref:John.3.15">\u2026<\/a><\/code>). This approach immediately breaks all browsers on the planet, rendering the links useless to the people who want to read the passages.<\/p>\n

\u201cProvide a solution to marking up data in existing web pages, rather than asking publishers to create machine-only side files in a new format.\u201d<\/strong> Ah, external files. Recommendations that you not create a separate, \u201caccessible\u201d site for your content have a pragmatic underpinning: the flashy, inaccessible site will get all the developers\u2019 attention and updates, while the accessible site gets updated occasionally or never. Similarly, even if you want to keep a running tally of all your Bible references, you\u2019ll still need to indicate their existence in your primary content. Either you\u2019ve just doubled your work, or you\u2019re already using some sort of microformat to allow automated parsing.<\/p>\n

\u201cSolutions accessible to millions of hypertext web authors are better than solutions just for programmers.\u201d<\/strong> Or, put another way, a markup solution is better than a programming solution. Anyone who knows HTML can add bibleref markup to their pages; you don\u2019t also need to know Javascript or PHP or Ruby or anything else.<\/p>\n

The central theme behind these assumptions: Microformats aren\u2019t (and don\u2019t need to be) perfect; they\u2019re good enough<\/strong>. If you didn\u2019t have any real-world constraints, you might not take the microformat approach. But real-world constraints are why I think Sean\u2019s bibleref proposal is so effective: it doesn\u2019t solve everyone\u2019s problems, but it solves one problem well.<\/p>\n

The distributed (bottom-up) nature of microformats provides their strength but also points to their primary weakness: discoverability<\/strong>. How many people are using bibleref? I have no idea, and I can\u2019t find a search engine that will tell me. (Technorati has a Microformats Search<\/a>, but it looks like they only index a few known formats from microformats.org<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

A Google search for [class-bibleref<\/a>] turns up discussions about the microformat, but not much actual usage. (And I know more people have used it than turn up in the search results.) I want a way to find and aggregate people who are using bibleref. Most of the value in the bibleref microformat (in my opinion) comes from seeing how others are citing the Bible. None of us is in the search-engine business, unfortunately (unless you are\u2014in which case, how about making elements\u2019 class<\/code> attributes searchable?), yet we still need some way to unobtrusively<\/strong> find and catalog microformat occurrences. In other words, the presence of the microformat itself should suffice for a search index; it\u2019s not realistic to ask people to add other tags to their page to work around search engines\u2019 current limitations.<\/p>\n

But perhaps I\u2019m getting ahead of myself. Or maybe Sean at Blogos has a grand plan that he\u2019s going to unveil in January at the BibleTech08<\/a> conference.<\/p>\n

Via ppk<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tantek \u00c7elik has thoughts on how microformats invert conventional approaches to problem-solving. (He invented the term \u201cmicroformat,\u201d so you can call him an expert on the subject.) I want to talk about how the proposed bibleref microformat follows each of the assumptions Tantek lists. \u201cSolve small specific problems rather than big problems\u2026. By focusing on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":257,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions\/257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}