When APIs go dark, how do you do a data backup? (Answer: you often can’t.) With public, microformatted content, there will likely be a public archive that can be used to reconstitute at least portions of the service. With dynamic APIs and proprietary data formats, all bets are off.
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On the flip side microformats are pretty much guaranteed to be lossy -- trying to express what is complex and unique about a given service with embedded CSS class names seems doomed to fail.
Rather people should be demanding high/perfect fidelity APIs from hosted services and doing regular backups.
Otherwise you're sharing cropping, and things will end badly.
kellan - 9th February 2009 22:24 - #
kellan: Or you expose it as RDFa - all the data-richness on a page. :-)
Simon Reinhardt - 9th February 2009 23:42 - #
I want some of that Kool-aid. It seems far more likely that a chunk of HTML is gonna change as a result of a layout change than a documented API.
This emperor's wardrobe is so last year.
James Wheare - 10th February 2009 01:20 - #
OK that was a little trolly, sorry.
I suppose that's what happens when a quote gets yanked from it's broader context. I read Chris's full post *after* posting that comment. It's an interesting challenge to convert measured thought provoking writing into a useful soundbite that doesn't just encourage a knee jerk reaction.
James Wheare - 10th February 2009 01:35 - #
Well, a lot of people seemed to miss the point of my post, but I can tell you that Ma.gnolia's Recovery tool (recovery.ma.gnolia.com) DOES make use of the embedded xFolk microformat in various caches from the web.
If it weren't for the xFolk, I think it would have been somewhat harder and at least less efficient than having it, and besides, the pages needed HTML class hooks anyway... why not use the ones from the appropriate microformat?
Also, no service-side backup is going to make a difference if a company goes out of business and takes their site offline (iwantsandy.com anyone?). That's where it seems most likely that microformats can at least make some difference, even if they're not a replacement for an overall data back and recovery plan.