Some years ago I attended a W3C workshop on something or
other, and my major contribution to the workshop was a quote to the effect
that:
In today’s Internet, no protocol is implementable whose print rendition registers on a bathroom scale.
It wasn’t exactly a significant contribution, or even true, but as a soundbite, it had some legs. I thought of that notion reading Ed Summer’s comment on my interview in the Netsquared series. So, this post is my reply (Thanks, Ed, for leaving that soapbox where I could trip over it!).
The first thing I had to do was find out what microformat means. I’ve seen the term, and had a sense of it, but wasn’t sure what it meant precisely. I can’t imagine I’m the only one in the sandbox to whom this happens daily, but being on sabbatical somehow makes my confession more admissible.
Define:microformat in Google didn’t help (which made me feel a lot better!). Yahoo led me to the Wikipedia entry, leading to my relief in recognizing it as an implementation strategy for Ockham’s razor – do the least that works. Gotcha.
So, Ed observes:
A few of us have been working on a citation microformat for a bit now, and it appears to be converging on something like DC and a reuse of other microformat modules where appropriate.
There is a lot of subtlety packed into this statement, though at a high level, it makes all the sense in the world. The partisan in me squawked… "something 'like' DC"? Why not a true subset of DC? And I hope you've looked at the Citation Working Group... but I digress.
The notion of modular, extensible building blocks of structured data is foundational to the Dublin Core, expressed in the Warwick Framework, a conceptual architecture that was a major outcome of the second Dublin Core workshop in 1996. It gave rise to my favorite metadata metaphor – the Lego™ metaphor – which I’ve used in scores of talks on metadata over the last decade.
I’m not sure I’d go so far as to credit the idea of microformats to that early digital library work, but we certainly were on the same path. RSS, vCard, events, and a variety of related small-chunk data structures all fit very neatly into this idiom.
The trend in modularizing library services that Lorcan has called ‘unplug & play’ is very much within this spirit as well. It is the way things are moving, and it seems the right way… perhaps the only sensible way in today’s environment.
Are there clouds wrapped around these modular silver linings? Certainly some darkling questions.
Monolithic services have limited flexibility (the spittoon joke comes to mind). All or nothing. Bring your data dump truck.
Disaggregated services (I’m liking the term microformat more and more!) afford greater flexibility, easily configurable into new services unthought-of of last week (the remix, or recombinant idiom). Hurrah!
But there is no free lunch, and with greater numbers of smaller services, there are more blocks to manage, and the dark side of the Lego metaphor emerges:
T'was the morning of Christmas
and all through the house
not a creature was stirring
for fear of walking on all the darned Lego™ blocks with their sharp little corners strewn in chaos over the floor
In order for all our modules to interoperate we need to catalog them, understand their functionality, their interfaces, their maintenance and change history, and make them discoverable. They need to be (re)combined in coherent ways, which means they need to be designed according to a coherent architecture. Is this happening?
I doubt it. One of the appeals of microformats is that they are quick and easy, simple solutions to simple problems. As stand-alones, they are economical and powerful and appealing. Irresistible, really. The Labnotes blog has a funny and insightful take on this (though speaking of citations… I dare you to find the creator for this site). The flexibility that microformats afford is an essential feature of the hyper-innovation that characterizes Web 2.0. But will they magically fit together?
Lego blocks may be child’s play, but they are engineered to tolerances that approach those of the internal combustion engine, and designed within a tightly-regulated architecture that spans half a century.
The complexity of the world remains (increases, really), and while we may find more efficacy or efficiency in one strategy or another, there is no magic bullet for coping with that complexity. Deal with it in the architecture of the systems, the structure of the data, or the complexity of the applications, but deal with it we must.
So… do I like microformats? Heck yes. I think I helped popularize the notion in a grey-bearded, Web-1.0-kinda-way. But we’d best pick up after ourselves, ‘cuz walking on all those blocks is going to be painful the morning after.
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Image: Skerries Harbor, Ireland. June, 2004
