Meta Data

Following on from Ray Ossies excellent cut and paste demo at Etech last week I have been thinking about the architectural implications of the demo and there appear to be two; the first is how to have and extensible script add in engine within the browser which is pretty easy actually and the other is the data format or schema. His demo showed using a Hcard Microformat but clearly we need many other microformats too which Ray actually pulled out in his call to action.

I am a great believer in standard metadata and schemas the snag I  have always had about them is that in practice they never seem to work very well. I was looking through Wikipedia today and found this great link which I think covers many of the issues with meta data.

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 15, 2006
  Hi Michael,
  
  You're right that in practice many (in fact, most) attempts at standard metadata/schemas have not worked very well for a number of reasons (too theoretical/academic, too invisible, too complex to author etc.).  The Cory Doctorow essay that you linked to provides excellent food for thought as well.
  
  For more on hCard, check out the spec: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard">http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard
  
  And for many more microformats (some specified and implemented, others in progress), check out the microformats site and wiki:
  
  http://microformats.org/
  
  http://microformats.org/wiki/
  
  And join in the discussion at http://microformats.org/discuss/
  
  Thanks,
  
  Tantek
  
• Anonymous
  March 15, 2006
  Thanks Tantek. I enjoyed your talk at etech and am a strong beliver in microformats as I think that they get around many of the problems discussed in the article. Do you know of anyone else at Microsoft who likes Microformats (apart from Ray of course!)?