Scope of Microformats

August 5th, 2005

I've been doing a lot of work with Microformats, recently, but have hit a stumbling block: scoping. According to the reltag specification, scoping is possible:

rel="tag" is specifically designed for "tagging" content, typically web pages (or portions thereof, like blog posts)
Source: reltag

For example, here's a chunk of code borrowed from ideaShrub:

For this block, the appropriate scope for the two tags is within the 'li' element - but how can I specify that? For all some application knows, the 'scope' of those tags is within the 'p' element - or maybe the tags are related to the page as a whole. Why isn't this specified anywhere? How should scoping be handled - am I missing something?

On the other hand, if you look at the hcard microformat, they seem to be a little bit clearer by saying that a card is wrapped in:

Which makes sense. Maybe there needs to be some sort of generic 'object' or 'item' microformat - you could use reltag, xfn, and even hcard all together to describe the object at hand - it just needs a proper scoping wrapper to make it possible. Should I be looking at RDF for this sort of issue, or am I just overlooking something?

Tags: reltag, microformat, microformats, xhtml

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Geographical Microformat

July 9th, 2005

One 'movement that I've been keenly watching is the growth of Microformats, embedding reusable data nuggets into the XHTML of a web page that both users, and applications, can understand. A new format that seems to making a rise deals with embedding geographical information into a web page. Attaching a Geographical location to a virtual URL is old hat (see GeoURL) but providing a visual, or intuitive format for the end-user is an interesting challenge. Hopefully this will make some more headway then simple, invisible, meta-tags from the day of GeoURL.

Tags: geo, url, microformat, data

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