Chris Aldrich

tl;dr: It's easy enough to support microformats v2 (and even backcompat for v1) and they don't/shouldn't create any conflicts so why not support them out of the box?

I think that a forward-looking platform like Auttomatic should definitely be supporting (and perhaps even iterating internally) on microformats2, particularly since they're simple added classes that give semantic meaning to the massive amounts of data that are put on the web via the platform. This makes them much more valuable to end users of the web (and doesn't mean they're simply a cut-and-dried SEO tool for Google's benefit.)

Though schema and microformats are meant for the same types of general functionality, their implementations and pros/cons are different. In part, Google controls the schema structure while microformats are more open and extensible, particularly if/when additional classes seem necessary in the wild. Additionally, Google, et al. certainly don't ding sites that use one or the other or even both.

I also know there were a few plugins in the repository that used to support microformats v1 that aren't actively supported anymore (see https://wordpress.org/plugins/hrecipe/ for example with an install base of 600+). Since a plugin really isn't required to add support, putting it into the canonical end-all shortcode for recipes on WordPress is probably the easiest thing for wide-based support.

Kevin Marks does a pretty good job of laying out microformats vs. schema here: http://www.kevinmarks.com/microformatschema.html. Because of the ease of use of microformats2, back in May Kevin was able to build a quick parser to inject mf2 into their site to attempt to save the BBC's Food & Recipe database (http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/) when they announced they might discontinue it and take it offline. (See: https://twitter.com/kevinmarks/status/732586363128664064; https://twitter.com/kevinmarks/status/733115448410116097)

Amy Guy, part of the W3C Team and co-staff contact for the Social Web working group, also has some useful thoughts on the benefits of microformats (and comparison with linked data) as well: http://rhiaro.co.uk/2015/08/extensibility

I'm doing some parsing related work on my suggested (pending) pull request to make sure that parsers will properly read the recipe data. It may require a tweak or two prior to pulling.

Additional References:
http://tlks.io/talk/microformats-with-tantek-celik
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/166612/schema-org-vs-microformats

This popped up a few weeks ago in my little free library, and expecting that it fell into a similar category as my friend P.M. Forni's works, I thought I'd give it a quick read. Given the title, it certainly wasn't being marketed to me directly, but I suspect the writer lost the battle with the publisher for giving it a more sophisticated subtitle.

In particular, it comes out in the category of books fashioned from tying together ideas from a commonplace book(s). It's well written and covers a broad variety of ideas and research, which most are unlikely to be aware.

It's a bit more prescriptive and accessible to most in comparison to [book:Thinking, Fast and Slow|11468377], though I prefer the later for its depth. I was somewhat disappointed that her references were primarily from writers living after the 1400's while I initially expected to see more material from 400 BCE to 500AD, but one can obtain many of these from the aforementioned [author:P.M. Forni|148299] references. I was disappointed that her one passing mention of <i>eudaimonia</i> was for its simple existence as a word rather than for its relation to the thesis of the overarching text.

Having read many of her references including having been a fan and proponent of Benjamin Franklin's system for several decades, I didn't learn too many ideas I wasn't previously aware of, though it did make for a relatively interesting biography, in great part because of a large overlap in my interests and the author's.

I ran across many poor reviews of the work which seemed to focus on the writer's privileged background and her choice to write on this particular topic. I find this generally disingenuous as I seriously doubt any of these critics would have leveled similar barbs at any of the better known philosophers from ancient Greece onward and every one of those authors also held positions of power, prestige, and/or wealth. The real difference between the groups of writers is that this is a meta-analysis and general recipe for a modern approach to happiness while prior efforts by the classical writers were generally of a more straightforward philosophical bent.

I wasn't a fan of the inserted comments from the author's blog as a general narrative construct, though they did serve to provide additional ideas outside of the direct sphere of the author's experience to give unimaginative readers ideas about how they could use the advice to structure their own program.

As very few are aware of and even fewer have tried to implement Franklin's system, I could easily recommend this to a variety of people, though given the title and the marketing viewpoint of the book, I'm not sure many would take the content as seriously as they ought. I would rarely read, much less recommend a "self-help" title, but though I wish the references to the science of happiness were more thorough here there is some great underlying scientific material, so I would recommend this to anyone who wants to contempalate how to live a happier life.

Chris Aldrich

Black Pepper Rye | Fornacalia

Cornbread for Fornacalia | Fornacalia