October WSG Meetup: Microformats | Comments (15)
Posted in Events on 17th August 2006, 9:32 pm by Stuart

Due to going on holiday in September I’ll be missing out on both Barcamp London and d.Construct. This has also made it really impossible for me to organise the second WSG event for September (when it should have been as I wanted to do these events every two months), not to mention a lot of you will be having a busy month anyway, given the cool stuff happening.
So the plan is that the next WSG event will be held on a thursday in October and the topic for the whole evening will be Microformats. Now I think this really is a fascinating topic and the purpose of the event will be to explain what microformats are all about and to get all of you to start using microformats in your work where possible if you aren’t already started doing so.
To help with the planning of this event I’m interested to know, is there anything about microformats that you’d like to see covered at this event?
I’m looking into venue options in central London presently and I’m also interested in securing a more geek-friendly venue for drinks afterwards so if you have any ideas for either of those please let me know.
I’ll post more details as soon as I have them.

I’d like some discussion/instruction about how to mark-up recurring events (for example, those constituting a weekly programme schedule, where each program is more or less the same, and in the same slot, from week to week).
Not sure if I’ll be able to make to the meetup, but still, would be great to see this covered amongst other things.
How about the applications of microformats?
It’s all very well and good understanding microformats, but what are the various uses for them across al the different genres of web site? How about some case studies for things like ecommerce sites, corporate sites, blogs, portfolios etc.?
Great choice of subject though. Looking forward to it already!
Oooh, excellent. I’d like to know how to mark up the cost of an event (and also a reduced cost for booking early). I had a look through the specs when I was marking up some data that needed just this, and I couldn’t see anything that fitted.
I’ll definitely be there. Probably a good call not having it in September - it really is going to be a busy month. Currently I’m number one on the waiting list for Barcamp London, I’m down in Brighton on the 8th, before scooting straight up to Nottingham on the 9th, I’ve got my birthday to fit in there somewhere, and I don’t think I have a weekend free until well into October. It’s a busy life…
Count me in. Not sure what you should cover, but there’s some overlap with the WSG group and the microformateers (myself being in both). I’d suggest a good overview talk for new comers (applications of, semantic web) and maybe a slightly more advanced topic.
This might be a cool WSG meeting. However, I’m not traveling three hours (on a week day) to the big smoke, just for a couple of hours. However, the Multipack will be holding some presentations soon enough, and I’ve been writing a Microformats presentation for that.
@Trovster: Understandable that you’d choose not to travel 3 hours on a weekday. Hopefully you will get something together that’ll cater for developers who live north of london. Oh and what do you mean “might be a cool WSG meeting”
At our Geek Meet in Stockholm in June we had a talk about Microformats. You can find a good write-up in Current issues with Microformats. Maybe a good point to start a discussion?
All,
I very much encourage you to raise questions and issues (like recurring events, applications, etc.) on the microformats-discuss mailing list so that some things can be quickly answered (e.g. applications, see http://microformats.org/wiki/implementations ) and others at least somewhat discussed so that a richer in-person discussion is possible.
http://microformats.org/discuss/
Robert, as far as that “Current issues with Microformats” post, most of those have been disposed of with the microformats.org FAQ and other discussions. E.g. namespaces themselves are actually more of a problem and this has been well documented on the microformats.org wiki. The poster also misses the whole point of DRY, the need to prefer visible data to invisible metadata, etc. Putting data in class attributes (as is suggested for dates) has also been refuted as a bad idea (see invisible metadata critiques). If you feel any of those issues actually merit/require any further discussion, please post them individually to the microformats-discuss mailing list.
Thanks,
Tantek
I’d love to see some discussion in the area of Microformats for computers and the parsing of Microformats.
Looking forward to October already
Why are you doing this? Wouldn’t it be more sensible to get behind the London Microformats event, which is just a few weeks before this one?
@Buck: Surely the more events relating to microformats the better?
That’s one way of looking at it. Another is that it’s dividing what could be one great event into two inadvertantly watered-down events.
“Hey Fred, are you going to this Microfotmats event?”
“Nah, I’m going to the other Microformats event”
@ Buck: There’s another key difference–the other Microformats event seems to be a social gathering, whereas Stuart’s event is a proper standards meet up. I feel there’s a very distinct difference in the tone.
Still looking forward to this, any idea when we’ll get the details nailed down?
@David: Hi David the details should be online later today. Thanks for being patient!