I have in the past expressed skepticism against the claim that Microformats are “Designed for humans first and machines second”.

I would argue that Microformats are to machines what CSS is to humans.

There are more than one similarities between what CSS and Microformats are trying to achieve, or even how they manifest themselves in terms of implementation. They do, after all, share a common platform - HTML.

One of the most important common goals shared by Microformats and CSS is making the resources they decorate more meaningful to the receiver of those resources. And while making a heading bright orange and bold would make it look more like a heading, something directly linked to a human reader’s understanding, decorating a div with class="vcard" facilitates a program’s perception of what the marked-up data is representing and how it is to be treated.

Imagine a tag cloud in two states, before and after its entries have been enhanced with rel-tag. A casual human reader would always perceive the entries as tags regardless of rel-tag and would in fact be oblivious to its existence. The human reader recognizes the tags because of the way they look, as instructed by the web page’s stylesheet. A tag aggregator script on the other hand would not recognize the content of the cloud as tags before it was marked as so with rel-tag.

Ultimately, and through various levels of indirection, most, if not all, information is to be used by/for humans. It is probably the amount of levels of indirection that signifies what is designed primarily for humans and what is designed primarily for machines.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 16th, 2007 at 12:08 pm and is filed under Microformats, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.