The BBC, microformats, RDFa and Resig

2008-06-24T08:53:59Z

The BBC have recently opted to remove hCalendar microformats from their Programmes site, due to problems with the use of the abbr tag clashing with accessibility tools. One of the potential alternative solutions they're discussing is RDFa.

The excellent John Resig, brain behind jQuery and a million other wonderful Javascript projects, comments on this development in his blog. Take the time to read his post now, it's short.

Resig is someone whom I admire greatly. In particular the quality of his work and thinking, and his dedication to tidying up hairy technologies like JavaScript and Mozilla APIs into developer-accessible frameworks (jQuery, FUEL).

So I was a bit disappointed, and frankly weary, to pick up on the continuation of the bogus microformats vs RDF holy war in his post. I wrote the substance of his post in the comments on his blog, but will repost here for completeness.

The BBC criticism of microformats' use of the abbr tag is a valid one. The microformats' community don't need to "step up and prevent attrition" as Resig writes — as if the enemy was advancing over the front — they need to fix a bug.

Resig reads the RDFa primer and comments that it is

"... obvious that RDFa still has a long ways to go before any sort of practical adoption by developers and designers. Riddled with advanced, or just plain confusing, terminology (XML namespaces, Dublin Core, semantic web, and not to mention the addition of many new attributes - like typeof, about, and property) it appears to be solidly entrenched in the ways that Microformats were able to shake themselves free of, allowing them to achieve widespread adoption."

Resig moves too quickly to dismiss RDFa. In a similar way I know many people who on encountering the HTML5 specs strongly espoused by Mozilla have the same impression of confusion and complexity. It doesn't necessarily make the work less valid, it's just a reflection on the document.

One of the wonderful things Resig has done with JavaScript is take time to love it and figure out its corners. Take some of the "confusing" and "advanced" things away and you're not able to achieve the same things. What he's done in jQuery is add a layer of elegance, predictability and accessibility.

I for one would love to see what Resig would do with semantic markup. jQuery really encourages and enables good markup practices, so there's a lot of synergy with his current style.

I'll happily concede that RDF people rarely do themselves any favours in the departments of over-engineering or academic self-satisfaction. I also think microformats have natural limitations. There's a place in between, and it's where people John Resig do their best work.

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OpenID and microformats support on XTech site

2007-02-27T11:09:20Z

Thanks in no small part to the advocacy of Simon Willison, I've just OpenID-enabled the XTech web site.

Users can now create their accounts using an OpenID, or associate an OpenID with an existing account.

A single-sign on solution like OpenID solves an important problem for us, as most people tend to interact with our conference web sites in only one or two time periods each year. While we've gone to the trouble of making retrieving a password easy, there's still the mental burden on the user of setting up the account and noting it down somewhere.

As a measure of the impact of this on me personally: I habitually save registration confirmation emails in a certain mail folder. Since 1997 I have collected no fewer than 572 of these, and I'm sure some have been missed!

One other cool thing about OpenID is that finally I can get the identity I wish to have. No longer do I have to be a compulsive early adopter of every service just to get the name edd. (Well, as long as said service integrates OpenID of course!) Personal branding is an important attractive aspect of OpenID.

Implementation

Implementing OpenID using the Ruby ruby-openid gem was quite straightforward, as was the logical integration into our user models. I've not been the only one following this path recently, as illustrated by this post on Rails OpenID integration from Dan Webb.

The harder problem of deploying OpenID lies in making the user interface work well: ultimately that will have a huge influence over its uptake.

We've made a decent first go of it in Expectnation, but I'm sure we'll evolve and improve it over time. The main puzzling thing is how obvious to make the OpenID facility, given its relatively small take-up right now. We don't want to confuse normal users too much by using it.

Microformats

When I did my behind-the-scenes piece on the building of the XTech schedule last week, one feature I didn't discuss was the support for microformats we have in the schedule and on the session pages. If you use a tool such as Operator, you can easily save talk times to your calendar while reading the schedule.

I'm personally a little late to the microformats party. Being a fan of pragmatic RDF, I didn't see much need for microformats right away. However, with tools like Operator I can honestly say that the use of microformats does enhance the XTech schedule.

My impressions of microformats (in particular hCalendar and hCard) from using them are mixed. One the plus side, it was very easy to do. On the negative side, I found them restrictive in the sense that for the metadata to be present in the hCalendar object, it needs to be part of the HTML presentation.

So, while microformats are meant to be about making human readable data useful for computers, they can have a tail-wagging effect on the human markup. Let me elaborate.

In the conference schedule there is a grid overview. For readability here we want to keep the details down to a minimum in each box. There is definitely no need to repeat the date of each presentation when you can see there's a grid per day.

But also we want to have microformats available in the page so users can use the grid to pick off talks to add to their calendar. The only details you currently get from the microformat are those you physically include inside the div marked as vevent. This means we can't embed the full details, such as the talk description. It also means I indulge in some dubious markup practices (an empty abbr element) in order to get the date and time into each hCalendar object.

It seems to me that this could be ameliorated by more intelligent user agent behaviour. Each of my hCalendar events is given a URL. At the end of that URL is a full description of the event, using microformats. So, as long as I reference the URL in a summary page, the user agent can beetle off and pull down the full information, in much the same sort of way that FOAF uses the rdfs:seeAlso property.

So, remove the expectation that microformats provide complete data, and I'm sold.

Other schedule features: iCal, Upcoming.org

Of course, we have iCalendar support in the XTech schedule, so you can subscribe conventionally using iCal, Evolution or a similar program. Aaron Straup Cope took the iCalendar, and uploaded each event into Upcoming.org. If you look at the upcoming events tagged xtech07, you see the results of his work.