Blog :: Ray Ozzie and Microformats

I was impressed by Ray Ozzie's ideas about transporting data between web apps. Playing around with his demo is impressive. It's even more so when you realise this is pasting semantically structured text that can be parsed and sent to the server in intelligent ways. I agree that the way forward to a more semantic web is by partial innovation: embedding microformats in web pages doesn't get us all the way to Sir Tim's vision but it does get us a little closer.

That said, I think some credit should be given to other people. I have no doubt that the idea occurred to Ozzie independently and he has gone so far as to implement something. It would be nice, however, if he mentioned Tantek Celik who has practically been synonymous with the idea of microformats. I also think it's worth pointing out that the idea of a web clipboard is not new. Bill Burcham mentioned on Lesscode October 21st of 2005 the idea of copying and pasting microformatted html between browsers and even defined an xml namespace to standardise message passing around this idea. You should have made a demo Bill...

Posted on March 15th 2006, 10:22 AM