Although Tails heavily depends on microformats right now, I never really saw it as being an extension just for dealing with microformats. That’s why I chose the name Tails as oppose to My Big Ole’ Honkin’ Microformats extension. Tails is about viewing and dealing with embedding data on web pages, and microformats is currently the best way to do that on the web. When embedded XML w/ CSS catches, Tails will support that too.
Having said that, I don’t see microformats going away very shortly, at least not because of embedded XML. Creating microformatted content is hard enough – I can’t imagine a lot of content writers and/or web designer buying into this over-engineered approach and having to worry about multiple XML schemas, namespaces, and properly formatted XML when creating their web content, even in the presence of tools that will purportedly make this easy. This stictness/wellformed-ness is too counterculture to the web to be massively adopted.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
First off, love your flocktails version. Not too sure if it as the intention of microformats or yourself, but I see a great use for both, the ability to leave an invisible “calling card” in blog comments/forum posts/blog posts.
So, for example, i have left my hcard in this comment, (actually testing as am not too sure whether html tags are going to get stripped out – have used your chiklet as an example image, hope you don’t mind), so rather than just seeing my name and website if I have one, people could use flocktails to discover more about me, thus reducing needless space on comments/forum posts.
The only problem at the moment is the vast amount of code I have to drag and drop, not too sure if it is possible for people to have the info stored elsewhere, put in a simple link and flocktails reads that info from elsewhere???
mctonesJust another guyScotlandemail me
Unfortunately, Wordpress is going to strip out the HTML entered in your comments. The correct way to do this is for me to update my template to convert the commenter information to hCards automatically – which is something I’ve been meaning to do. This way there is no work necessary for the commenters to leave their calling card.
The only issue I have with converting existing name, website and email automatically that I have is it is not adding much vaue to what is already there – name and click on name for website.
The angle I like is the invisible bit – much like your hcard, you just have a chicklet on your site, all the hcard info is hidden thus reducing blog real estate useage. If we as commenters were able to easily add a full hcard, viewable with flocktails only, it increase the ability for everyone to get to know a lot more about each other, but importantly not have loads of contact info visible all over your site.
Just a thought and maybe not what microformats/flocktails is designed for.
I see where you’re going with this, but I think the same results can be reached by automatically converting the commenter information. What Tails could do is use the commenter URL to derive more information about the user, so for example, if the URL is to the commenter’s Technorati profile, we can pull that profile information from Technorati and display it in Tails. Or we can go even further and try to locate some sort of XML file from any URL and pull information about that.
By the way, if you’re still using Flocktails, you should try using the latest Tails extension instead (the latest version is compatible with Flock):
http://blog.codeeg.com/tails-firefox-extension-03/
oops, hit return button…
If tails could derive more info from the url that would be awesome and ultimately what I was after (just so we are on the same wavelength, if I had an hcard somewhere on mysite.com, it could pull that in?).
Will try tails version 0.3 but I kind of like the topbar of flocktails….