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Chris Messina's Open Letter to Google; the case for hAtom

edit David P. Janes 2006-09-04 12:14 UTC 6 comments  ·  ·

Google is in the process of revamping the way Blogger.com works. Chris writes:

Hello,

Not sure to whom I should address this request, but I’m very excited about the Blogger Beta and that it represents an open opportunity to add support for microformatted content.

You can read more about microformats at microformats.org, but to summarize, microformats are community-developed standards for identifying certain kinds of information in webpages using your typical HTML tags and classes.

In particular, this is my wishlist of microformats that I would love to see Blogger support:

  • : okay, you already took care of this one, so kudos!
  • XFN: WordPress already supports this, and it’s especially useful for representing lists of friends in blogrolls.
  • rel-me: from the XFN family, being able to link to other pages on the web using rel=”me” creates an informal means of “claiming” other places where I publish online. Read about Ma.gnolia’s addition of rel-me.
  • : marking up personal profiles in hcard means that if I add personal contact details, people can click a link to add me to their address book without any extra typing. I’ve done this on my main blog. Clicking the “Add me to your address book” link will convert the HTML content in that page into a .vcf file that most address book programs can recognize.
  • : In order to make it easy for my readers to add events that I’ve blogged about to their calendars (Google Calendar or others, like iCal), I can use hcalendar to mark up this information with a link to add the events to their calendar. Here’s an example.
  • hAtom: This one is fairly simple to implement since you’re already classing most of this information already. hAtom uses element names from Atom as class names. This allows people to subscribe to blogs directly, without the need to subscribe to RSS. You can read more about this.

Though the benefits may not seem immediately obvious to supporting microformats, the amount of effort required to add support is fairly minimal compared with other, more substantial features that you’re probably already working on. Furthermore, our community would be happy to help with the process of adding support to Blogger, validating your work and providing guidance along the way. This initiative is also not a commercial effort; rather, it represents the work of a large, distributed, worldwide community that wants to build out the value of the “lowercase semantic web” and to make data storage in web pages a reality.

In some respects, we are at a chicken-and-egg crossroads but the more support that we see for microformats in the wild, the more tool makers, publishers, browsers and other applications will reap the benefits of this effort to essentially modernize the web, incrementally building upon the existing infrastructure.

Thanks for your consideration and please let me know if there is any way that I can be of service.

Chris

We fully endorse this letter and in particular would like to make the case for getting hAtom into the template process ASAP:

  • hAtom identifies almost all the commonly used elements in blog posts.
  • standardizing around hAtom class names will make it easier for designers to modify and understand templates. Actions, such as "print this post" can use a shared printing CSS file, as it will inherently understand how all posts are structured.
  • standardizing around hAtom class names will make it easier for search companies -- such as Google! -- to understand that a page contains blog posts, what part of the page conatains the blog posts and what isn't part of the blog post. This will make search results within blogs more accurate by giving the ability to ignore "incidental matches" where one blog posts matches but (for example) some other non-important term in the sidebar matches also
  • standardizing around hAtom class names will make it easy to do "reblogging" -- that is, quote part of the content of one blog post into another post -- thus making it easier to create blogging communities and blogging conversarions
  • as new templates tend to be created from existing templates, the greatest benefit for adding hAtom to Blogger templates would be to do this as early as possible in the development/roll-out cycle

Updated (2006.09.05):

  • machine-readable weblog archives (tip: Danny Ayers); this would be especially powerful if combined with a directory of posts (OPML/XOXO) or a microformat for marking weblog archive structure
  • Winer-style "river of news" pages can be made with a simple one-stop XSLT transformation

Comment #1 — Blake Winton

2006-09-05 18:39:43

So, I'm a little confused about the value of hAtom...

Is it trying to do an end run around the auto-discovery stuff, so that people don't need to put in the link tag?  Is it so that they don't need to create the Atom feed in the first place?

Comment #2 — David Janes

2006-09-05 22:23:23

Hi Blake,

I'm not sure what else I can do besides list the points above: make machine analysis of posts easier, make search results more accurate, make it easier to manipulate posts for printing or reblogging, simplify posts for special case applications (such as mobile).

I certainly never mentioned anything about auto-discovery, link tags, atom feeds, rss, syndication or any of those other things simply because I don't think hAtom will ever be a substitute for a RSS or Atom feed, nor do I think it's a particularly good idea to do so! This has been hashed out over the years in various places, but basically the reason is that HTML files are too "thick", too unreliable, too bandwidth intesive, and have too much unneeded data for the issues that syndication are supposed to address.

 

Comment #3 — Blake Winton

2006-09-06 16:40:25

Sure, but you could just use the automatically-detected atom feed to do all of those, no?  I mean, we're going to have to rewrite the tools we have now to handle hAtom, so why not just rewrite them to preferentially look at the atom feed, which at this point has far greater penetration?

(I should probably say at this point that I don't really understand microformats.  I've heard from enough people whose opinions I trust that they're good, and the features listed seem neat, but I don't "get" them, or how we go from where we are now to where the advocates think we'll end up...  Although, it sounds from the BlogMatrix demo I saw that BlogMatrix would take us a lot of the way there.  ;)

Comment #4 — Blake Winton

2006-09-06 16:41:58

Oops, I also meant to say that this is probably too long a conversation to have in the comments section of your weblog, and I imagine the data is already out there somewhere, but I haven't recently had time to search for it, or read it in depth when I found it.

Comment #5 — David Janes

2006-09-07 15:09:51

The comments section of a weblog is a perfect place for this sort of conversation!

One of the major points of microformats is that you don't have to duplicate your data elsewhere in a second source to encode data. This is a philosophy that you can buy into or not, but I'll argue it's a very very good idea:

  • data normalization theory says you shouldn't split up inherently related data
  • hidden data tends to be erroreous data
  • most tools we have work against HTML (i.e. Google); if the data is encoded elsewhere, how do you get to it? I'll note that RSS and Atom have been for a long while but for the most part there's still no easy way to get archival RSS or to map a post to it's corresponding RSS element (i.e. you found a post with data -- how do you get the data out?)

I've been working on a concept called the "datasphere" (name stolen from Dan Simmon's Hyperion) that encompasses how structured blogging, tagging and microformats could be used to bubble up data in an enterprise (and the net in general) from being hidden in special purpose XML formats and databases and encoded directly into HTML. Thus, when you find the HTML you've found the data also. There is a place for XML: RSS/Atom and OPML/XOXO provide updating and directories to bind closely related sections of HTML together.

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