As you seem to recognize yourself, the scope of microformats is limited to the (large) realm of fairly simple tagging problems. On the other hand, if you want to do the kind of complex, many-fielded thing that is demonstrated in the wonderful but geeky reger.com screencast, you probably want something like x-subnode and XML as your format. But, if you don’t need that kind of power, you don’t have to use it. The x-subnode mechanism is simply provided to handle those cases that don’t already have solutions, those cases where the data to be stored is complex, and those cases where industry standardization efforts have already defined XML formats and it would be ridiculous to go reinventing the wheel by converting these standards to microformats, RDF or some other format.

Personally, I don’t agree that “microformats” are as simple as you suggest. I think they are much more complex to edit and parse than simple wrapped XML inclusions that exploit the x-subnode method…. Digging around in XHTML DOM trees looking for class and attribute tags ain’t pretty… However, if people want the microformats as a result of their doing Structured Blogging, it’s ok with me. What I want is to see people do Structured Blogging. I’m not much concerned with what formats are the result of people doing it.

In developing the Structured Blogging effort, we’ve followed your rule of “humans first, machines second”. Rather than blathering on at length about formats, etc. what we do is provide tools to make it easy for humans to do Structured Blogging. Our tools focus first on helping publishers produce well formatted, visually distinct, and easy to write blog entries. These tools are valuable whether or not any downstream processor ever reads the structured data which is embedded in the resulting posts. We’ve “proved” this by strictly refusing to build any applications that aggregated Structured Blogging posts even though we released the first version last winter and there have been hundreds of bloggers using the tools since then. We wanted to drive home the point that it makes sense for bloggers to use these tools even if noone exploits the structured data other than their own blogging system. For an example, take a look at: http://incredibooks.com . The kids that run that site have been writing book reviews for months. Clearly, Structured Blogging helps them build a better site.

Structured Blogging is a thing you do. Microformats are just one of the things that might result from your doing Structured Blogging. x-subnode might be there too. Who cares. It is the activity of Structured Blogging and the production of formatted data that is important. Which format is used just doesn’t matter in most cases.

bob wyman