#microformats 2025-04-30

2025-04-30 UTC
[ruslan], [morganm], Saige_Leah_, barnaby, [jeremycherfas], Guest6 and ehmry joined the channel
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cymbaline22 Hey there, is there a microformats2 format, even if it is experimental, that can be used to mark up music? For example, as part of a song or album review h-entry, or as a recommendation list of artists.
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cymbaline22 h-product doesn't particularly fit, and h-item is something of a generic catch-all that feels improper to use for something as popular and ubiquituous as music.
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[tantek] hi cymbaline22, do you have existing example of a page with that kind of content?
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cymbaline22 [tantek]: I mean, posts about music and artists aren't particularly rare, right? Off the top of my head:
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cymbaline22 - https://libre.town/shrines/music/six_tears.xhtml (standalone single-page cassette tape review)
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IWDiscord <c​ymbaline22>
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cymbaline22 - https://mars2027.neocities.org/obscuremusic (music album reviews on one page)
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cymbaline22 - https://www.thefrugalgamer.net/music.php (list of music the author published)
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IWDiscord <c​ymbaline22>
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cymbaline22 None of them use microformats or are particularly well-written HTML, but content like that exists nearly everywhere.
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cymbaline22 [edit] [tantek]: I mean, posts about music and artists aren't particularly rare, right? Off the top of my head:
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cymbaline22 - https://libre.town/shrines/music/six_tears.xhtml (standalone single-page cassette tape review)
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IWDiscord <c​ymbaline22>
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cymbaline22 - https://mars2027.neocities.org/obscuremusic (music album reviews on one page)
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cymbaline22 - https://www.thefrugalgamer.net/music.php (list of music the author published)
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IWDiscord <c​ymbaline22>
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cymbaline22 None of them use microformats or are particularly well-written HTML, but content like that exists nearly everywhere.
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cymbaline22 [edit] [tantek]: I mean, posts about music and artists aren't particularly rare, right? Off the top of my head:
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IWDiscord <c​ymbaline22>
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cymbaline22 - https://libre.town/shrines/music/six_tears.xhtml (standalone single-page cassette tape review)
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cymbaline22 - https://mars2027.neocities.org/obscuremusic (music album reviews on one page)
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cymbaline22 (The first website is mine; but the version that's currently online is outdated as I am working on a huge semantic HTML, accessibility and microformats rework behind the scenes)
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[tantek] artists are people / orgs so they can be marked up with h-card, nothing special needed there. you can use categories as tags if you want to label artists as a particular music genre
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[tantek] and yes for examples of pages I did mean to specify pages of yours that you are working on updating
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[tantek] the key thing we have found is that for it to be worth any time marking something up, or creating a new microformat, there has to be active interest in building tools that parse and read and do something "interesting" with that markup. otherwise it ends up neglected and unmaintained, a mostly theoretical exercise
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cymbaline22 Fair enough, I understand that. I have to admit that my motivation for the whole POSH/microformats thing from the very beginning has been that I am fascinated with categories and structured data due to being autistic. I don't particularly have a practical use case for any of the technology. I see why it _can_ be useful, but in practice, I have not come across a single still-existing-in-2025 implementation of anything that use
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cymbaline22 The difference that I considered when I thought about music in particular is the amount of data that is music-related that cannot be semantically expressed right now with the existing formats. Sure, an artist-work relationship is quite easy with h-cards and rels. But consider for example linking lyrics to a particular piece of music, media formats (CD, vinyl, cassette etc.), "sampled-by" or "is-cover-of" type relationships an
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cymbaline22 I see similar practical use cases to h-recipe or h-product, for example, for a theoretical semantic web agent. If I want to look up what that one sample is from a song I am listening to, right now I have to find some dodgy website and hope someone reported it there. If I am on YouTube and would like to read reviews of that particular song across the web, right now I have to attempt and match the title in a search engine, whic
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cymbaline22 Let alone recommendation of similar music based on cross-referencing positive review scores of people who liked this song and also others; or traits like 'upbeat' or 'sentimental'.
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[tantek] Sure! Such tools would certainly be useful. The challenge is that "new formats" of "lack of formats" are typically not the reason for such tools to not exist. Usually it's a lack of sufficient interest by folks to build the tools in the first place.
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[tantek] Such tools could be built today without any special formats, by bootstrapping them with traditional text based indexing of a handful of sites that already publish such information as text.
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[tantek] linking lyrics to a particular piece of music is quite similar to linking captions for a video, for which there are various formats, so that's worth exploring
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[tantek] publishing a list of musical "works" is not (much) different than publishing a list of books or a list of articles like a bibliography for which there are again existing formats and methods of publishing. you could start with h-cite for marking up musical works. you could start with adding categories to them like "CD", "vinyl", "cassette" to indicate their media format.
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[tantek] you're right that there's not so specific as "sampled-by" (which also sounds like a backlink that could break, probably better to flip that around to "sampled-from" and link to the source, perhaps with a rel) or "is-cover-of" which could also be an experimental rel value to start with
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[tantek] another way to think of it is, whatever problems you are trying to solve for music, someone has already likely solved it for video, or books, or both. try re-using those approaches before exploring inventing something music-specific
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