Now, I know most of you are probably mimicking a monkey scratching his head in confusion after taking a look at the title, but hear me out and it’ll all make sense in a jiffy. First off, I don’t mean it quite so literally, but more through the form of an analogy. Developers generally follow a series of principles when developing for microformats:

• solve a specific problem
• start as simple as possible
• design for humans first, machines second
• reuse building blocks from widely adopted standards
• modularity / embeddability
• enable and encourage decentralized and distributed development, content, services

Thanks to this article about Microformats Recycling, they pointed out that these look very much like the Three R’s of Environmentalism: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Their analogies were as follows:

• Reduce
  • solve a specific problem
  • start as simple as possible
• Reuse
  • design for humans first, machines second
  • reuse building blocks from widely adopted standards
• Recycle
  • modularity / embeddability
  • enable and encourage decentralized and distributed development, content, services

Now, the whole purpose of microformats is to simplify a problem, reuse existing standards and redeploy former approaches that have yielded successful results. These guys have discovered quite an interesting, and more importantly, effective, analogy for talking about microformats and their development.

Tags: Environmentalism, Microformats

This entry was posted on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 12:49 am and is filed under Findability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.