#microformats 2022-01-30
2022-01-30 UTC
# [schmarty] not sure of the right term, but the block protocol doesn't seem to have "governance" for the schema behind blocks. like it's either very prescriptive (e.g. the "person has a firstName" thing that tantek mentioned) or it's very do-whatever-you-want, since it seems like anyone can publish any kind of block.
# [tantek] Yeah, starting with that, the VERY FIRST block / schema / property is a classic western-centric error: "So the schema for a *Person* has the properties *firstName*" which means the author has close to zero i18n clue (sorry if that's harsh but this takes such minimal research that it's painful to see this error)
# [tantek] I mean seriously the diagram in the image preview literally is *mostly pre-existing HTML elements* (or trivial pairings thereof): paragraph/<p>, heading<hn>, list/<ol>/<ul>, quote/<blockquote>, code/<pre><code>, preformatted/<pre>, pullquote/<blockquote class="pullquote">, image/<img>, audio/<audio>
# [schmarty] for sure. the main "innovation" here really seems to be taking the WordPress block editor (which is all about plumbing to allow authoring tools to read back what they wrote) and making it work outside of WordPress.
# [schmarty] (which feels like it could 100% work for microformats2 π€·ββοΈ)
# [tantek] if for some reason you actually need explicit markup to say "this thing is actually a block" (and other elements are not, may be decorative, wrappers etc.), then fine, add class="e-block" to each block inside the h-entry. parses out into a flat array of ordered blocks inside the h-entry. presto.
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# [snarfed] to be fair, block protocol's perspective on schemas is evidently more nuanced than "either prescriptive or do-what-you-want." see https://blockprotocol.org/docs/faq#is-the-block-protocol-an-ontology-of-the-real-world and the next few items
# [snarfed] and they're not quite as naive as that Person/firstName example implies: https://blockprotocol.org/docs/faq#why-aren't-the-default-schema.org-definitions-sufficient
# [tantek] snarfed, you're also experienced enough to know that this was tried (XML, RDF), and already effectively failed multiple times: "permissionless ability to build atop and extend schema./org, unbounded by the processing constraints and imagination of any single working group or organization"
# [snarfed] all I know is I enjoyed this exchange: https://twitter.com/photomatt/status/1486780761755709440
# Loqi [@pbakaus] @photomatt @spolsky @WordPress @matias_ventura FWIW - I've iterated on a proposal codenamed Progressive Elements in 2017 that tried to achieve many of these things - I'm more than happy to share it with any/all of you if helpful. I couldn't staff it internally back then, but maybe it will help you on your journey.
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# [schmarty] snarfed: thanks for the reference! It was more thoughtful than I expected.
# [schmarty] Still kinda boils down to: "these schema.org folks did a lot of work, so use that. It has biases, contradictions, and omissions, sadly. Hope you're able to recognize and work around them. good luck!"
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# [KevinMarks] If you go looking for readymade schemas, schema.org does jump out, sure. But do you want their inheritance worldview?
# capjamesg[d] Inheritance worldview?
# [KevinMarks] schema has a hierarchy of types that inherit from each other, and so end up with odd properties from the parent (volcanos have fax numbers)
# [KevinMarks] they also tend to have a lot of parallel names for similar things, whereas in microformats we try to use the same name for similar properties, rather than inheritance
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