microformats overhead

From IndieWeb


microformats overhead is a kind of markup overhead, specifically the additional effort required to maintain a web page’s microformats markup when you want to make changes, which can be non-trivial at times, despite being much simpler than setting up or maintaining alternatives such as JSONLD, microdata, RDFa, schema, all of which require adding and maintaining more markup than microformats2. (see Kevin Marks article comparing microformats2 to alternatives for more comparison details, examples, etc.)

This additional effort can result in feeling limited in what you can change on a page because you don't want to break (or otherwise have to re-check, or update) the microformats markup. [1]

Why

Why bother with microformats overhead?

This is a good question to ask and worth keeping in mind for any new microformat (root class), or new feature (property or value). See the specific microformats pages for why they are worth adding as compared to the increased overhead of maintaining:

Always consider what the overhead is (microformats or otherwise) when proposing any new authoring or publishing feature that requires web site owners/developers/authors to do more work. Any such new microformats2 features must provide compelling advantages or use-cases that outweigh any new markup overhead.

Examples

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So far the "microformats overhead" is an accepted reality per dev chat discussions, but there are no specific examples to cite. Please add some below if you know of any (and update this text accordingly).

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Any citations of real world examples where people changed their site/page/theme and broke their microformats, had to do extra work to fix their page?

Any citations of chat examples of someone expressing a desire to make a change but being afraid to do so for fear of breaking their microformats markup?

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See Also