microformatique - a blog about microformats and “data at the edges”

Judging by the comments and coverage a couple of recent posts on microformats have got, they’ve struck something of a nerve.

Kyle Neath wrote “I just don’t get this whole Microformats thing”.

The crux of Kyle’s argument is

I feel like the microformats crew are actively trying to make this an elitest club. I’m not very stupid (I don’t think) but when I first started researching microformats it took me ages to really understand it. It turned out to be dead simple.

Right now, the content at the wiki is largely specifications, and related documentation. And specifications are to some extent of their nature difficult - they are formal documents, whose role is to unambiguously, but completely, define a technology and its constituent elements.

Kyle’s frustration is definitely legitimate, but I’d like to observe that microformats are still, despite being increasingly widely known, in their infancy.
Unlike most standards development, the microformats process is “bottom up” - much more like open source software development than the kind of standards development you get out of the ISO of W3C.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that no one whatsoever gets paid or is officially employed in even a voluntary capacity in association with microformats. Some people might be lucky enough to have jobs that allow them to get involved during work time, but even that handful (at most) doubtless puts in a significant amount of after-hours effort. It really is a labor of love for all those involved.

If you went back a decade or so, you’d find very similar responses to CSS - there was little more than specifications out there - few if any books, few if any sites dedicated to CSS - if you wanted to get up to speed with CSS, then you needed to get to grips with the specification.

A lot of people expressed this level of frustration with CSS back then - in fact it sounds very familiar to me. And then as now, it was legitimate.

10 or so years ago it prompted me to write “Everything you ever wanted to know about style” (now the far more boringly titled Complete CSS Guide) and more generally, “The House of Style” a set of resources associated with CSS - tutorials, examples, articles, and other resources
I’m proud to say, it’s still around, literally tens of millions of page views and a decade later, and much updated too.

Others developed sites (quite a few predating ours) - css.nu being one of the first. People like Eric Meyer wrote wonderful books, and articles for development sites (sadly many of which are now defunct). Over a period of a couple of years, at least, an “ecosystem” of resources, software, training, guides, and so on, emerged around CSS. But it definitely took quite some time.

I have no doubt that the same is, and will continue to happen with microformats.

Right now, I’m doing a couple of things in that same vein as the stuff I started doing a decade or so ago with CSS.

Microformatique is a bog dedicated to what’s going on with microformats, and I’ve just started a new “Know your Microformats” series - each installment going into detail on one micrforomat, but staying practical and educational.
And I am doing something that despite a number of offers, I never did with CSS - I am writing a book on microfomats - one that’s actually pretty close to being finished. I hope that it will help those interested in and new to microformats get up to speed with the minimum of frustration.

And I’ll let you in on a little secret - I get frustrated sometimes with microformats - just as I did with CSS. But I see that (and this is my personal response) as a price for being associated with a technology in it’s infancy.