I was shopping online for a replacement for my bluetooth wireless mouse for mac, and I read that there was an alternative mouse driver that might let me tweak the acceleration settings to something more acceptable.

I ended up downloading and trying Steer Mouse, and it’s actually pretty good at doing that. You can bring down the “Tracking” and bump up the “Sensitivity”, and it won’t be as wonky. Qualitatively, there’s also less noticeable lag between mouse movement and actual input (something that’s been driving me crazy as well). It may hold up better in heavy application use as well, time will tell.

However, one thing I wasn’t willing to live with was the default remapping of middle click to “Move to Close Button”. To change it to work with Firefox new tabs again, you can remap it to the Click action with a apple-key modifier. Seems like that works again. I’ll let it go through the trial period and see if I still like it after some more use.

My earlier post about the costs of microformats led to some interesting comments that I’d like to respond to at the top level here.

In this comment, André Luís brings up his personal experience with ease of publishing hAtom, and also points out that it may have just been my publishing platform which gave me difficulty. He also mentions that i’ve overlooked added value for power users.

Shira believes that many of the problems I listed will go away with maturity of the microformats project, and are present because of its work-in-progress status.

Yes, it’s true that there will be some cases where publishing microformats will be a technically straightforward matter (especially with say, hAtom or hCard). I don’t wish to say that it’s always technically difficult, but what I’d really love to get across is that there are not only potential technical landmines, but also policy and relationship complications that can result from such a move. In the case of my publishing platform, which was, in my case, in-house written code, there were extreme difficulties in attempting to contort our markup to something that would follow microformat structure expectations in hCalendar and hCard. Additionally, publishing microformats resulted in ongoing maintenance, policy, and backwards-compatibility costs that were not considered at the get-go. No matter what method you use to reach out to developers or power users, you will need to pay the price to keep those relationships healthy, and your data strong. Microformats don’t make your job any easier, because you’ve just intermingled the methods you use to serve your general user base and your developer base. Haphazardly publishing microformats while keeping your developer API users happy is going to cause grief for some users, and will likely be interpreted as sloppy behavior.

I certainly have avoided discussing any of the potential value of publishing microformats, as the title of my previous post may let on. I find that nearly all of the information available solely discusses the benefits without spending due time on the costs. Furthermore, the benefits of microformats (as well as the potentially reduced technical costs that Shira refers to) are, from a pragmatic standpoint, hypothetical. As a writer, it’s my hope that by spreading more complete information, people can make more educated decisions, and I feel that what’s missing in the hype about microformats is the discussion of costs. So, I apologize if I don’t spend much time on the benefits, but I really feel you can get more of that information elsewhere, as long as you remember that those benefits are typically projected onto a vision of the future where microformats are omnipresent. I’ll just say that I don’t see many benefits that aren’t already available to publishers who conform to the existing standards that microformats are based on.

So, what is the likelihood of a world in which microformats are an accepted standard in XHTML publishing? What are the chances that your real, tangible costs will eventually be paid back by real, tangible benefits? How would you begin to evaluate or consider that likelihood?

Typically, standards succeed when there is a massive market need that has not yet been met. However, there already exist viable, well-known methods of serving the needs of both browser users and developers, so I don’t see why these large publishers should invest in serving the “power users” market in between those two, when these power users needs are so close to that of developers. The power users are often served by the standard data formats underlying microformats anyway. Also, the developers often take developer platforms and build products specifically targeted towards power users! So, I don’t see a large, unmet need. To me, it just seems like an product aimed at serving a niche user base that is already being served pretty well.

Also, there is the fundamental matter of data quality that drives the growth of a standard. If your data is questionable, nobody will want it. Or, they’ll collect it and throw it away. If your data is valuable, consumers will go to great lengths to take in and use as much as your policy allows. This natural magnetism that high-value publishers have predates microformats, and explains well why there are dominant platform APIs that don’t seem to play by the rules of standardization. Sure, there is a high technical barrier to entry, but typically, these producers invest heavily on data quality, policy, AND their developer relationships. Relationships between publishers and consumers around valuable data is what drives your average successful Web 2.0 platform, not whether the publishing format is standardized. So, if you want to really predict adoption of microformats, pay attention to the data quality of published microformat data.

If you want to consider the potential of momentum to bring about a microformat-based future, you’ll pay attention to the spread of adoption of microformats, and the hype surrounding them. As mentioned above, I would encourage you to also frame your perspective according to the data quality of data made available via microformats, but that requires a lot of time and energy to really evaluate. The vision here is pretty blurry; I think that’s just the nature of hype. It’s easy to get excited about something before the costs come into the picture.

Essentially, by publishing microformats now, you are becoming an early adopter. These standards are not mature, which Shira is essentially pointing out. The costs may one day be lower, but by getting into the game now, you are not only placing a bet that many others will follow, but also they are subsidizing the costs of publishing for latecomers. I don’t think that the current tangible costs outweighs the current tangible benefits plus the hypothetical benefits multiplied by the likelihood of them coming to pass. But don’t take my word for it. I’d just encourage you to at least make an educated decision, and consider all of the costs I listed in my previous post before taking the plunge.

I’m done with microformats. From now on, i’m either building separate developer tools and relationship, or i’m not. I say that having been through the cycle of adopting hCalendar and hCard a few times, not just as an industry commentator. My reasons are threefold. First, in the real world, publishing microformats requires you to rewrite DOM structures, publish extraneous invisible elements, adopt new schemas, and adopt data publishing-like structures on frontend pages intended for the browser. Second, the relationship between publisher and developer is not significantly improved by microformats, and would be better served by a separate pathway for developers. Third, its proclaimed benefits as a standard are extraneous because hCard, hCal, etc. are valiantly attempted, but incomplete redefinitions of existing standards like vCard and iCalendar in XHTML-like formats.

The idea of microformats sounds swell, inexpensive, and easy. Take your existing data, and surround the data-ish bits with tags that separate it into parts with semantic meaning. Unfortunately, saying that something is easy does not make it so. I don’t mean to disparage the work that microformats mavens have done, but my experience with being a microformat publisher has shown that things are exponentially more complex than they let on in the “sales pitch.” I don’t think they realized what they were getting into when they started on the process of actually getting publishers to conform to this stuff.

Surrounding your existing markup sounds simple enough, right? But consider how you’ll have to nest things together. Should you publish microformats on both listings and detail pages? Are there required fields that aren’t present in the content you already have on the page? Do you just publish lots of invisible XHTML content to the page to fill in the missing stuff? Do you dare to deal with recursions? What if your data is split up in separate divs? What happens when your data model does not fit with the standard? What if you are not a very good HTML contortionist? What happens when your presentation is different based on varying pieces of available data? Is hCard publishing even useful at all on public pages without private, uniquely identifiable information? Oops, there are no microformat validators, either. This is especially difficult for something with as many ominous implications as a stepchild of iCalendar.

Much like an oral agreement, publishing microformats is an informal agreement between you and (hopefully) a developer community that sets up a relationship with plenty of vagueness, inertial resistance to change, and potential landmines to step on. Would you create a real developer API without a TOS, agreement, or at the very least, guidelines? Are you prepared to deal with objections if, when cutting costs, you rev a frontend design and lose some important aspect of microformat structure on the page (or, god forbid, you just don’t bring microformats over at all). Alternatively, are you prepared to announce all frontend markup changes? Does publishing a microformat without a special agreement mean that you are implicitly allowing comprehensive scraping of your web data? If you spend an hour seriously considering the costs of treating your frontend interface as a programming API for the sake of your relationship with developers, would you then rather spend those costs there, or on proper versioning, documentation, and communication with a developer community over a real publishing protocol or API? Publishing microformats while not having formal consumer support is a commonly what happens, but it is a poor midway point to leave yourself at.

The only place I can still imagine microformats surviving a cost/benefit analysis is in the case of preparing for search engine crawlers. In theory, if everyone publishes their websites according to a few semantic standards, the Big SE’s can embed structured data in their search results and act as aggregators of real data. There are a couple practical issues that you’d have to ignore in order to go for this pipe dream, though. You’d have to hope that the structure of microformats is fault-tolerant enough to survive the endless mangling of random developers trying to publish junk data, and that whatever was clean enough to make it through would be parseable, high quality, not eliminated in dupe checks, and relevant to a big enough segment of searches to justify the cost for the search engines to link to it. Second, you’d have to accept the fact that you probably wouldn’t get any permanent special treatment in search results, lest microformats become a new meta tag for SEO. Third, you’d have to assume that the big SE’s wouldn’t take these handful of high-order data entities and send it to their big topical datastores for aggregation and republishing themselves. I realize the benefit of a “standard.” However, why wouldn’t big aggregators crawl the web for content that conforms to existing, more mature standards that microformats are based on? Especially when these have often been passed through working, real world consumers of vCard/iCalendar before making it to production.

Anyway, here’s the question I want to put into the reader’s mind: should one spend time and effort making a frontend into an informal API through microformats, or to instead spend it on building a fully supported API or data publishing system that exists and operates separately? I think my stance is clear – i’m not against the theory of microformats, but i’m certainly going to differ with anyone who thinks it’s practical. If you can really think all that through, and still think microformats are a good thing to spend your resources on, then by all means, give it a shot. Just don’t say you weren’t warned.

Quick tip. Since the dev only built a windows binary for version 0.2.1 of uTidyLib, this bugfix for locating the dynamic libtidy on macosx is necessary.

Just edit tidy/lib.py, re-run the setup install script, and it suddenly can find libtidy.