Over the past year there’s been a lot of atten­tion (in cer­tain circles) for “micro­formats”. Essentially, micro­formats are stand­ard­isa­tions of class-values to use in html. The implied bene­fit is that any 3rd party (be it a browser or another site) could eas­ily gain access to that inform­a­tion and be able to do some­thing use­ful with it.

However, aside from a few prac­tical issues, micro­formats are a fun­da­ment­ally flawed idea.

Microformats are an attempt at cli­ent side innov­a­tion. Looking at the his­tory of (x)html, javas­cript and css (the three main cli­ent side tech­no­lo­gies), you can see it’s rife with incom­pat­ib­il­it­ies. The stand­ard­ised ver­sions of said tech­no­lo­gies have also had (and con­tinue to have) very long mar­ket pen­et­ra­tion times (the time it takes for the sup­port of a tech­no­logy to spread among end users).

The funny thing is that these prob­lems can be mit­ig­ated by some­thing very simple; server side innov­a­tion! It’d have a couple of huge advant­ages. First-off, it’d give more con­trol over the user exper­i­ence. Since micro­formats don’t define how they should be handled by User Agents (UA’s, like browsers or mail cli­ents), you have no way of know­ing how your code will exactly be inter­preted by them.

Secondly, it allows you to use more com­pat­ible tech­no­logy on the cli­ent side (html, css, vCards, pdf, you name it). This means it would work, right now, for every­one. Also, espe­cially for sites that use a CMS (sys­tem to man­age a sites’ con­tent), server side solu­tions are a lot easier to implement.

A few examples of micro­formats, and an explan­a­tion why they don’t provide any (busi­ness) benefits:

hCard — Have extra mark-up so you can point to an external site which pro­duces a vCard? Mark-up which might force you to deal with UA’s which may mess up the res­ult­ing vCard because they inter­pret hCards dif­fer­ently? Why not just upload a vCard or have your CMS gen­er­ate a vCard automatically?

hAtom — Making the page itself it’s own feed? So the full, heavy, page can be pinged by feed read­ers all the time, using far more band­width and mess­ing up stats? Are you kid­ding me?

So yes, I do think that micro­formats are not worth imple­ment­ing yourself.

A place for the weird stuff, the funny stuff, the wrong stuff, the totally way-too-cool stuff and a whole lot more:

[update] We’re done with Testiculating.

See that lil’ flame in my “Inspiration” block? It used to lead to a dusty old site. But now it’s back, with a ven­geance! Yes. Design by Fire, the crit­ic­ally acclaimed journal on design, life & everything by Andrei Herasimchuk, has risen from the ashes.

Can’t wait to see what wis­dom he has to share with us!

And no, I’m not just say­ing that because it might help my chances in the (very old) DxF Recoding Challenge…

Joen, my Danish friend who runs a journal and graph­ical instal­ment out­let, has just launched the new design of his site. (You heard it here first kids!) And what a design it is! As I said on Joen’s site itself:

May I be the first to con­grat­u­late you on Pangea! It really does take good care of your sites whole eco­sys­tem, while being so clear and effect­ive it pos­it­ively hurts! It’s nice to have a use­ful homepage, the instal­ment box in par­tic­u­lar is a great fea­ture. For the rest, great align­ing, fant­astic white space — not that we expect any­thing less of course :)

The atten­tion to detail is pretty darn good too. Even the X to close the comment-formatting-box has a high­light state! And to my sur­prise the wee bite you’ve taken out of the top-right of the boxes break up the boxxy­ness enough — even though they’re really small bites.

Solid design, and I can’t wait what col­ours you’ll inject with one of your (semi)-monthly redesigns.

~ source: Noscope Pangea

Bite Size Standards, a pro­ject that has taken up quite a lot of my time has launched today. It was ini­ti­ated by John Oxton of Joshuaink fame, but as CSS guy all parties had to deal with me, so I ended up doing and influ­en­cing a lot. It’s been really fun to work with the whole team and it’s been par­tic­u­larly great to finally shush out some semantic and access­ib­il­ity quer­ies. So for now, I’ll just leave you with a descrip­tion of what Bite Size Standards is.

Bite Size Standards aims to offer con­cise web devel­op­ment tutori­als, tips and tricks. Written by design­ers and developers who are pas­sion­ate about web standards.

A full slightly longer write-up of what we actu­ally went through and why we did cer­tain things will come a lot later and can be found on my port­fo­lio.

Stuff is good.

~ me on Stream of Consciousness 3 at noscope.