Mike Linksvayer had a nice comment on my recent talk at the Semantic Technology Conference.
I think Uche Ogbuji's Microformats: Partial Bridge from XML to the Semantic Web is the first talk I've heard on microformats that I've heard from a non-cheerleader and was a pretty good introduction to the upsides and downsides of microformats and how GRDDL can leverage microformats for officious Semantic Web purposes. My opinion is that the value in microformats hype is in encouraging people to take advantage of XHTML semantics in however a conventional in non-rigorous fashion they may. It is a pipe dream to think that most pages containing microformats will include the correct
profilereferences to allow a spec-following crawler to extract much useful data via GRDDL. Add some convention-following heuristics a crawler may get lots of interesting data from microformatted pages. The big search engines are great at tolerating ambiguity and non-conformance, as they must.
Yeah, I'm no cheerleader (or even follower) for Microformats. Certainly
I've been skeptical of Microformats here on Copia
(1,
2,
3). I think that
the problem with Microformats is that value is tied very closely to
hype. I think that as long as they're a hot technology they can be a
useful technology. I do think, however, that they have very little
intrinsic technological value. I guess one could say this about many
technologies, but Microformats perhaps annoy me a bit more because given
XML as a base, we could do so much better.
Mike is also right to be skeptical that GRDDL will succeed if, as it presently does, it relies on people putting profile information into Web documents that use Microformats.
My experience at the conference, some very trenchant questions from the audience, A very interesting talk by Ben Adida right after my own, and more matters have got me thinking a lot about Microformats and what those of us whose information consolidation goals are more ambitious might be able to make of them. Watch this space. More to come.