Vannevar Vision

From my experiences attempting to integrate microformats into XML structural summaries, the results have all been workarounds.

Microformats are integrated into an XHTML page through the ‘class’ attribute of an element. I won’t go into the issues with doing this and while the additional information embedded into the page is welcome, it doesn’t conform to the standardized integration model offered by XML. A good reference on integrating and pulling microformat information from a page is here.

Microformats are not easily retrieved from a page because there is no way to know ahead of time what formats are integrated into the page. A workaround in creating an XML structural summary based on microformats can be obtained by applying an extension of the XML element model to indexing attributes and furthermore their values (in order to identify differing attributes). Since the structural summaries being developed using AxPREs are based on XPath expressions, they will be able to handle microformats but with advanced planning on the user.

The screenshot below is of DescribeX with a P* summary of a collection of hCalendar files. Using Apache Lucene, the files are indexed to include regular text token, XML elements, XML attributes and their associatd values. On the right-hand side you can see a query has been entered searching using Lucene’s default regex ‘*event*’ to search for ‘class’ attributes that contain that term. The vertices in red represent the elements which contain it and while it would be nice to assume that the descendants of the highlighted vertices are related to hCalendar events, it is not the case.