Go take a look and see what’s wrong with your foot. 🙂 Also, make sure to check out my favorite PubMed article. I’ll give you the id… just search for that. It’s: 17328369.
Unfortunately, it isn’t a complete overhaul… in fact, it’s pretty minor. There are many things that I would like to improve that were “put-away” for later. The good thing is that it is a really big step, and based on today’s meeting, it certainly isn’t the last. I am excited about the things I can do to the next major release… if that is what I end up working on next.
After nearly 3 months sitting on my bookshelf, I got around toMicroformats Logoreading the Microformats book. I probably don’t need to mention that they’ve been pretty high on the “buzz” list for a while now. That aside, I like the idea, and believe they are worth using. With this post, I hope to give a high-level overview of Microformats… first sampling what they are and how to use them, followed by my thoughts on why you should use them.
What and How
Very simply, Microformats give our already semantic xhtml elements an extra layer of meaning when using a common set of attribute values. Consider the case of an “hCalendar”, a microformat that gives xhtml the structure of an events calendar. An events calendar is simply a set of events. This relationship is easily described by a parent-children relationship. The problem is that xhtml can easily describe parent-children relationships, yet it cannot semantically describe this calendar-events relationship. Microformats do just that… they provide a way to describe this common relationship through the use of attribute values.
To create an “hCalendar”, you would write something like the following:
As you can see, the supplementary calendar-events structure is added by setting specific attribute values, in this case ‘vcalendar’ and ‘vevent’. Microformats use exiting attributes like ‘class’ and ‘rel’ as hooks for this structure, in the same way these attributes can be used as hooks for additional CSS information. Additionally, these attributes can be applied to whichever element you choose*. I demonstrated the use of the same attribute/value pair (class=“vevent”) on the ‘span’, ‘div’, and ‘dl’ elements in the example above.
While I foresee a wide array of future uses for Microformats, there are limited practical applications today. That being said, the small number does not mean they have limited value; their use can provide substantial value. For example: later this week I am going to re-write the concert-listing page for my orchestra website. I am going to use the hCalendar Microformat to code this season’s events. I will then use an open-source converter to allow users to download a iCal file of this calendar on the fly.
Why would I do this? Because it’s advantageous. Using the hCalendar Microformat I can…
Well, that was kinda fun. I was trying to create a post, and when after I edited a <pre>, something I did killed WordPress within Firefox on my MacBook. So I went inside and tried it on my frankenmac, and Firefox died there… three times. Odd. So I turned on my trusty old PC, and it crashed Firefox there too!
Finally, I opened Opera for Windows and it brought up a post with all the categories and title set, but with an empty text box. Guess I have to delete that post, and try again! Boo!
So I had a problem a while back where I thought Firefox for Mac was picking up some left-over or un-overridden size styles, while the other browsers were not. It turns out that it wasn’t actually my problem.
While all of the other browsers that I tested… for both Windows and Mac display the default font (serif) set to .8em as glyphs that are 9 pixels tall, Firefox for Mac displays glyphs that are 8 pixels tall, but with 1 pixel of anti-aliasing on top. The difference of one pixel usually doesn’t mean much, but when dealing with font-sizes that small, it makes a big visual difference.
I submitted a Mozilla bug report which has not yet been picked up, but I’m not sure if there’s anything to be done, especially if the rendering engine is at all based on the system software (doubtful, since none of the other browsers work the same way). I wonder if the release of MacOSX Leopard is going to affect this.
Gotta love the Mozilla people, though. It’s such a relief that you can even submit a bug report for something like this. A chance for actual interaction, and a chance to better the product. I only wish Microsoft would pay a little attention.
