An XHTML Microformat for Questions and Answers
I am researching microformats and XHTML this morning. I want to define a structured format for HelpShare questions and answers to make HelpShare more crawlable, and also establish us as leaders in the area of discussion data portability. I am also interested in a format for product listings for another project.
The first question is - is a new microformat standard really necessary? There are some XHTML elements that I haven't used before that may be applicable (to questions and answers). My assumption was that there was a wider gap between what I could do with XHTML (or fewer choices) and what I want to do (nest answers with questions and cite the relevent asker or answerer).
Tantek Celik put together a good presentation on some of the more meaningful elements of XHTML.
The first question is - is a new microformat standard really necessary? There are some XHTML elements that I haven't used before that may be applicable (to questions and answers). My assumption was that there was a wider gap between what I could do with XHTML (or fewer choices) and what I want to do (nest answers with questions and cite the relevent asker or answerer).
Tantek Celik put together a good presentation on some of the more meaningful elements of XHTML.
The relevant ones to me were:
- dl, dt, dd
- blockquote/cite
Based on the presentation and a quick understanding of these elements, I'm contemplating markup that looks like this. Threaded discussions using XHTML:
This used up my time allocation for this morning. The next task is to figure out in more detail what distinguishes a microformat from standard XHTML markup. Is the above markup enough to transmit a question and answer? How should I include ratings and reward?
Labels: helpshare, microformats, xhtml
2 Comments:
If you're more interested in data transmission, and not so much in markup, you may want to consider JSON, which is very light-weight and becoming popular.
However, this won't help improve your "crawlablility", and doesn't provide the "display guidance" that markup does.
By
Heroic Autobot, at 1:59 PM
No, I'm interested in crawlable markup. Unfortunately, this may have to take a back burner for a while because no one is waiting to crawl HelpShare (and if they did they could use our perfectly good RSS feeds). I had hoped that taking leadership and establishing a format would essentially be good advertising for us and invite crawling.
By
Adam, at 7:21 PM
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