So I’m in need of a standard way of linking from a person’s profile to their external photos, blogs, vlogs, things and so on. Especially since I intend to use hCard as the foundation for usual information (name, email, homepage, etc), rel=me (from XFN) and XOXO for marking up the list of links.
Now, I went into the Microformats IRC channel to ask for some guidance (the source of this post’s title, via teh Ryanz0r) and got shot down big time. Well, not like that was surprising since I know most of the guys in there personally and they don’t take me all that seriously, but still…!
Anyway, in discussing my use case and proposing some new values for “rel=” (like, ‘photos’, ‘videos’, ‘tasklist’, etc), Ryan made an interesting point about the development of microformats that I think a lot of folks would do well to consider: the achievement of becoming a microformat isn’t an end-all, be-all that one need aspire to. Rather, standardizing and codifying existing behavior requires anthropological attention and patience to what emerges over time.
Interestingly, this is how law develops and how standards that survive and are adopted are developed (I would wager this is true most of the time — consider mp3). I’ve even proposed a solution to a problem I’ve seen repeating itself with my Community Marks idea — the hope in this case is that enough communities will run into this problem that the idea will take off, over time.
So this post is about the microformats process and how it actually works. Just because we’ve knocked off a good dozen in its first year doesn’t mean the next dozen are going to come right away or be obvious. The point is not to guess at a microformat and try to win, instead, just start doing something if nothing that fits what you need exists. Over time, a standard will emerge that can be codified into a microformat.
In my case, I’ll probably use rel="me photos" to link to someone’s Flickr stream, rel="me tasks" for someone’s tasks and rel="me favorites" for favorites. If it gets picked up, awesome. If not, I’ve got a solution that I can use for now until some standard behavior emerges.
And that seems quintessentially inline with the microformats process.
The things that bother me about Thunderbird on OSX are certainly many, but I can come up with one above all others that totally kills me: the lack of integration with the Apple address book. Nothing more than this illustrates the source of Tantek’s fervor for wanting data portability and his resultant hope in microformats.
