Institutional Knowledge

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Macroformats vs. Microformats

August 16th, 2006 · 9 Comments

Lets look at the Academic Calendar for fall 2006 for a moment. Would you rather have the page marked up with microformat hcal information, have the information available as XML (RSS & Atom), or in iCal format?

Me? I’d take XML first…but then I’m an edge case.

Tags: Information Design · Microformats

9 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Elaine // Aug 16, 2006 at 12:25 pm

    Is that really an either/or question? :)

  • 2 scott // Aug 16, 2006 at 12:45 pm

    I would agree with Elanie… I’m not really seeing an alternative here

  • 3 pberry // Aug 16, 2006 at 12:48 pm

    I guess it should have been phrased as “what would be more useful to you.”

  • 4 Elaine // Aug 16, 2006 at 1:21 pm

    well, in that case, probably iCal or hcal, the two being functionally equivalent with my current browser setup. personally, I find syndication formats not as well suited to handling future events.

  • 5 scott // Aug 16, 2006 at 2:23 pm

    Well, you see, the thing of it is… I’d really like the choice for both. That said, I think iCal makes a little more sense for compatibility with other calendaring applications like GCal or Backpackit

  • 6 Dimitri Glazkov // Aug 17, 2006 at 11:13 am

    Why not mark it up as hCal and use Technorati feeds (http://feeds.technorati.com/events) to make it available as iCal?

  • 7 carlos araya // Oct 12, 2006 at 12:10 pm

    Once you get the XML it should be easy convert to other formats, right?

  • 8 carlos araya // Oct 12, 2006 at 12:14 pm

    I’m just learning about this, but I think ical would be easier for most people (starting with me)

  • 9 pberry // Oct 12, 2006 at 1:14 pm

    The iCal format would be easy to consume, but with microformatting plain old HTML you get to offload the generation of other formats.