#microformats 2022-02-21

2022-02-21 UTC
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@shimabukuro "How to Consume Microformats 2 Data – Microformats" https://microformats.org/2022/02/19/how-to-consume-microformats-2-data (twitter.com/_/status/1495556873377894401)
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[tantek] Getting some uptake barnaby++
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Loqi barnaby has 6 karma in this channel over the last year (20 in all channels)
Eddy04[d], ur5us, antrdnv[d], ancarda, KartikPrabhu, sebbu, Ramon[d], rMdes_, KartikPrabhu1, jacky, GWG, [schmarty], angelo, Seb[d], ben_thatmustbeme, [aciccarello] and barnaby joined the channel
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barnaby [tantek]: yeah, good to see people are interested in the topic
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ccx How dead are microformats? I can't find any single browser extension that works.
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barnaby most microformats usage is on the server side these days, I’m not aware of any browser extensions which use the latest version (microformats 2)
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barnaby I did a bit of extension development a few years ago and was considering making something involving mf2, but multi-browser extension development was a nightmare at the time
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ccx Well, that's less and less of a problem given the ongoing extinction of browser engines. :-/
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ccx What do you mean by server-side? How do I actually use that?
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barnaby but afaik google still parses some classic microformats, and mf2 are used heavily in the indieweb community: https://indieweb.org/ and #indieweb (#indieweb-dev for development discussion)
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barnaby ccx: it just so happens that I wrote an article about exactly that a couple of days ago :) https://waterpigs.co.uk/articles/consuming-microformats/
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barnaby but did you have a particular use-case in mind?
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Loqi [Barnaby Walters] How to Consume Microformats 2 Data
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ccx I've been looking at various sites right now listing events (spoiler: after digging through the sources I found no icalendar & no microformats) and was wondering if there's a way to get event notifications that doesn't involve selling one's soul to Facebook. Remembered this used to be a thing and that Operator occasionally popped up on sites back when I had it active.
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ccx While I'm a programmer, I still had a pause at "how to use guide" starting with "choose a parser library" :]
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barnaby ccx: well that article is aimed at programmers who are already familiar with microformats and want to get started on consuming them, so I make some assumptions!
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barnaby it links to the earlier one in the series, which explains how mf2 works from a publisher POV
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barnaby so if you’re not familiar with mf2 then definitely start with that one!
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barnaby there are a few services which consume h-event, but none which I’m aware of which act as a way of getting notifications https://indieweb.org/event#Consuming_Tools_And_Services
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barnaby are you talking notifications that an event will happen (i.e. event discovery) or about updates to existing events (e.g. being notified about time/location changes)
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ccx The former mainly, though both are useful of course.
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ccx So the target audience is search engines and not website visitors now?
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barnaby well if the events are being posted about in a machine-readable way (e.g. mf2, ATOM, activitystreams) then feed readers like https://aperture.p3k.io/ will be able to subscribe to them, and probably send notifications — aaronpk does aperture have any special handling for events?
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barnaby but all of that functionality relies on events being machine-readable
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barnaby the target audience of most mf2 usage is people publishing and reading personal sites. so, useful for end users, but usually via a feed reader or other app rather than parsing mf2 directly in the browser
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barnaby but there’s nothing stopping people from doing so, and it could be useful! same with search engines. it’s just a matter of someone building tools for those specific cases
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ccx Yeah. I guess it's much more common to see ics feeds or individual files directly than h-event. And somewhat more common to get RSS/atom feed with new entries but without actually parseable metadata.
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ccx Same with RSS really, do browsers even show the feed icons still? I have feeling people mostly forgot about it existing.
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ccx Err, I've meant it's hard to tell one should parse the site for microformats. But the same difficulty applies to regular feeds.
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[KevinMarks] Have a look at events.indieweb.org - that's an open source tools by [aaronpk] that generates microformats and ics. You could run an instance of that and write one off importers for the sites you follow
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barnaby ccx: are there specific sites or services which publish events which you’re interested in?
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ccx I was just looking at local clubs really. Seems that writing a scrapper for those would be the only way. But I was mostly curious if I'm missing something.
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barnaby if they’re small local sites, it might be worth trying to persuade the maintainers to add h-event support. if their site is well marked up already, it only takes 5 minutes
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ccx Yeah I can try that. Though it's probably some off the shelf CMS, so it would involve adding support there first.
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barnaby if they’re using wordpress, there might already be a plugin which adds h-event markup — I see a lot of people publishing h-event on wordpress listed here https://indieweb.org/event
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barnaby #indieweb-wordpress is the place to ask about that
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ccx One of them is using Wordpress it seems, thanks.
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GWG barnaby: There isn't specifically, but some are close.
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barnaby ccx: ^^^ GWG is one of the resident wordpress experts ;)
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ccx But that's the only one with at least individual ical files it seems.
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ccx (Which is significantly more convenient for getting into EteSync anyway)
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GWG We had a community member who wanted to convince a developer of a popular event plugin to add h-event
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