I just got to this post by Richard le Guen via the referrals to my blog, and I feel it’s important to clarify my point.
So, let’s describe the problem. In HTML, you describe the layout of your information. How the information will look like is “presentation” and is managed via a so called Cascading Style Sheet, or CSS. Change the CSS, the visual aspect changes.
To bind the entities you describe in HTML with how they will appear, you use a standardized attribute, the class. An example is:
<div class="info">This is a message</div>
In this example, the info label is the class assigned to the content of the <div> HTML tag. Now you can change its appearance with a CSS directive like
.info {
color: blue;
font-size: 13px;
}
if you want the text to appear blue and of a given size. So far so good.
One of the problems in todays’ web is to give semantic meaning to things, so that a computer can extract the information and do smart things with it. Unfortunately there’s no clear way to perform this (well, there is, but we would get into an argument too complex to be described here).
Enter microformats: the point of microformats is to grant semantics through ad-hoc class names that are not only used as a representational reference into the css, but also are assigned to a well-defined meaning. Example:
<div>
<div>Joe Doe</div>
<div>The Example Company</div>
<div>604-555-1234</div>
<a href="http://example.com/">http://example.com/</a>
</div>
can be endowed with semantic meaning if you use the hCard microformat
<div class="vcard">
<div class="fn">Joe Doe</div>
<div class="org">The Example Company</div>
<div class="tel">604-555-1234</div>
<a class="url" href="http://example.com/">http://example.com/</a>
</div>
With this solution, a computer can now understand meaning out of the class attribute, and do smart things like aggregating data, and allow searching on it.
Some time ago, on Jeff Atwood blog, coding horror, a point was made about microformats and their problems. In particular to the fact that (citing Jeff) “the crux of microformats is overloading CSS classes“, and I tended to agree, considering technically wrong to overload CSS classes with meaning. Richard objected that the very definition at the W3 consortium about class attributes is also “For general purpose processing by user agents”, which convincingly includes hCard scrapping tools.
On this, Richard is right, and I’m torn on my previous stance. The point is that the class attribute is indeed specified as a general purpose tool, which specifically and most frequently is used for stylization purposes. Microformats are, from the formal point of view, a totally legitimate use of the class attribute. Nevertheless, when you overload classes with meaning you can incur in all the problems Jeff Atwood points out, and you should be very, very careful, or chaos will ensue. Formal approval for a usage is not always indicative of a safe practice, but in this case the problem arises from the fact that we tend to think at class names as something that has a meaning only within our web application. With microformats, this meaning extends outside the boundaries of our self-contained world, and this conflictual view can produce problems.
Edit : Another issue worth reporting is namespacing. The fact that you grant semantic meaning to a given class attribute means that a given string, say “vcard” conveys a specific meaning which is unique. If you take every possible available string in the world, they belong to a unique, flat namespace. Now, RDF-based semantics approach uses namespacing to distinguish different meanings granted to the same string by using, instead of a trivial string, a URI. In microformats, and in the approach used by microformats, you don’t have namespacing, but you have containment. For example, the class “tel” in the vcard microformat can be distinguished by another “tel” (for example, indicating a table cell on the same webpage) by the fact that the one in the microformat matches the selector “.vcard .tel”. It’s sort of namespacing, although with a different mechanism, and it’s done and built through the containment relationships among HTML elements.
It’s mind bending if you think about it, but once you see how it works, it’s kind of smart. It’s not as complex and demanding as RDF, not as powerful as OWL-based ontology description, but it can work for simple to medium complexity semantic data.
