To author microformat docs you need to identify which data goes in which fields, whether that’s through using separate text areas or inline markup of some kind. The way that information is recorded in the microformats happens to be as CSS attributes. But couldn’t the same info be recorded as plain XML just as easily? Ok, most (X)HTML editors for static docs include CSS editing, but if you’re dropping to a heavyweight editor, wouldn’t you be better off using something more geared towards data than presentation?

I suppose the bit that gets me is around “adapt to current behaviors and usage patterns, e.g. (X)HTML, blogging” – but what proportion of blogging tools allow per-post CSS editing? The current behaviour in most tools I’ve seen is to partition up the data in a form or whatever before it goes in the DB, then the XHTML view is templated from that, as is a “pure data” version, the RSS. It would be no more difficult to template the output as a microformat doc as a custom XML or RDF/XML doc.

Please tell me if I’m missing something obvious, but I really can’t see any significant simplification at the producer side, certainly nothing that outweighs the added complication at the comsumer side, having to extract the data from XHTML.

But like I said at the start, microformats do offer an additional route to machine-readable data and that gets my support.

http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/MicroFormats

and you will be able to answer your own question.

Tantek

I took this photo here, at this time, here are the people in the photos, here are some tags that image. Now lets see some similar photos …

If both are true, then I think I have a rough idea. ;-)