Fragments. Part 1
This is the first article (hopefully) in a series trying to expose some of my ideas about the content available on the internet, it’s evolution, it’s status, it’s future. I know people have wrote about this, perhaps the more important is that I understand myself better this thing called internet.
*Fragments.1*
Everything we write or publish is made up of fragments. Or items. Or bits. Whichever you like the most. The idea is that we conceive things as parts that belong to ensembles (is this English?). My blog is made of posts, which are made of paragraphs, which are made of text containing links, which points to other sites made of items … You get the picture.
You cannot grasp an idea if you don’t study or understand its parts. Except perhaps philosophy (which I am doing righ now :D) or arts like music or drawing (thoough for the music I can see a similar pattern of notes composing an _aria_ etc.) where the fragments are more closer to be atomic. Atom meaning something that _for the time being_ is not decomposed into smaller fragments.
I got thinking (so deep ! ;)) about this because of the microformats idea. I wrote about this before and it still fascinates me. I think a lot of the “web 2.0″ hype is pushed on because the web developers realized they can use the information available on the web to present it one way or the other to the user. The purpose of all is to allow users find and understand an information with its context the more quicly and conveniently possible.
Everything goes around this. Google’s search algorithms, Technorati’s blog search and tagging system, flickr’s pictures syndication, online mapping systems’ API availability, Amazon’s API, anything that was a “web hit” has do to with this.
In the beginning we only had links. A link is a tag that points to an information. Which can be a site. Which contains some text and some links, to other sites … Etc. This is the low level of the web.
Now, ten years after, we have a babylon of websites, static or dynamic, driven by a CMS or manually edited, with 10 or 10 millions users. Chaos. How can somebody find something in this? Yahoo and then Google tried to fix this by using super speed techniques and algorithms and indexes in order to bring everything on the web on their side, allowing them to present any information to the user _quickly and conveniently_.
Now the web people realize that this is or becomes impossible. And looks at the web at the low level again. Bu the low level is much more interesting now. The content begins to gain *structure*. Partly because of the automatization of the web publishing, partly because of the tools we use everyday. The standardization efforts of w3c and other organisms begin to make a difference.
Think about the CSS. It was supposed to help designers split content from look and now it gives people ideas like the microformats. Because after using it for designing the interfaces, people realized that they were using CSS classes corresponding to the styled content’s meaning or nature. It is natural to name a div’s class “product” when it contains a product!
So why not use what we already have on the web and try to look at it differently? Why not trying to use this structure emerging from the web’s chaos? microformats are a way of doing just that. Another one (related, but rather _niche_ comparing to microformats) is the structured blogging.
I really like both of these ideas, and I already try to find ways to impose some of those microformats in my projects. It is not easy, we have become negligent and relaxed when it comes to our XHTML content. It is kind of difficult to always try to use this ot that format. Very often the proposed formats are not complete or not perfectly adequate. Like hReview. It looks good. But for me it looks like a web shop item but incomplete. A web shop item _is_ a review of a product. But the actual hReview format doesn’t include enything needed for products. Of course, we can add tags to it. Perhaps this is the way to go, I don’t know. But it become soon clumsy and unreliable. At least right now I see it like this.
Anyway, I am convinced this is the way to go, find formats, apply them whenever you can, try to use standards. The second part of this will try to focus on reasons why we should doing this, but for now think only about the first web pioneers. What if we had right now something like 3 or 4 major web formats? Like HTML, LOLO, JOJO and MOMO. Which don’t communicate with each other. You see, HTML enabled all of this. And the “a” tag linked it all together.
*Further readings*
[1] “microformats.org”:http://www.microformats.org
[2] “XML.com: What Are Microformats?”:http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/03/23/deviant.html
[3] “XML.com: Microformats and Web 2.0″:http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/10/19/microformats-and-web-2.0.html
[4] “Microformats - Wikipedia entry”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microformats
[5] Josh / Bokardo: Structured Blogging: “Who is Benefitting and How? “:http://bokardo.com/archives/structured-blogging-who-is-benefitting-and-how/
[6] Paul Kedrosky’s Infectious Greed: “Structured Blogging Will Flop”:http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/002215.html
