Thursday 11 January 2007

Microformat & MetaData

Is the world going round and round?

When "IT professionals" discover metadata, everyone is going after it. Well the librarians have years of experience in cataloging information already! The debate, when covering a very diverse set of communities, has difficulty in standardising "metadata elements" and the allowed values in set of the "controlled vocabulary". Everyone has different needs and when politics take front set (and most politicians can code!), metadata is like dead-sea.

Microformat makes use of classes in tags to add "meaning" to the html elements. The class is like "metadata element". We need agreement so that it can inter-operate.

When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn? - I heard my CD playing.

This time around, microformat is driven by coders, people who actually put html elements together. Hopefully, it will not end up like metadata!

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