Do Microformats Make Web APIs Obsolete?

Mashup Camp 2 included a session on microformats and APIs. While the overall conversation rambled a bit, there were a couple of very intriguing threads. Kevin Lawver of AOL, for example, has spent a long time being frustrated by working with the Google search API. Lawver sees the power of microformats concentrated within the concept of grabbing a chunk of an HTML page and using it as raw data in a mashup. Why create an RSS feed or XSL transport, if microformats can be part of the original HTML markup? Why create new schemas again and again?

Someone has already written a prototype for grabbing chunks of other pages - for example, hCards. There's a Firefox extension called Tails that will convert hCards on web pages into vCards for Outlook. Also, Eventful (FKA EVDB) and Edgeio don't actually collect information directly - rather, they aggregate events from all other sites.  (Disclosure note: Omidyar Network is a funder of Eventful.) This implies that a service that generated microformats would be nice to have - whether it was embedded into the original page, or delivered via a middleman.

Although microformats.org has a lot of available definitions, they aren't aimed at APIs. Should they be? Microformats are meant for human-readable data, not for data that is already machine-readable.  If HTML becomes a web service language, then microformats obsolete the need for XML. (The DTD is dead. Long live the DTD!)

More info on this topic is available on the Mashup Camp wiki.

Tags: christine herron christine.net spacejockeys mashupcamp mashupcamp2 microformats xml api technology

Comments

[Raj Bala]

I'm going to guess that the possibilities of hAtom played into Feedburner acquiring BlogBeat.

And since we're pointing to our own thoughts on this subject:

http://www.internmentcamp.com/2006/05/03/technology/hatom-the-death-of-rss/

[Duncan Cragg]

Here's my own article on the subject, which you may find interesting:

http://duncan-cragg.org/blog/post/microformats-challenge-web-feeds-and-web-apis/

Cheers!

Duncan Cragg

[Christine]

Zoinks! Sorry about the misfire. Have made the correction above.

[Kevin Lawver]

I haven't been subsumed into the big purple Y! yet. I work for AOL (and am quite happy there if anyone's interested). Thanks for blogging about the session! It was my favorite of mashup camp!