To be useful - and practical - the News Credit format must be able to slot into existing systems and work-flows. It’s no good expecting journalists to spend extra time adding information once they’ve already written an article and are ready to publish.
This is why it’s been built so it can be easily integrated into existing publishing tools or ‘Content Management Systems’ (CMS). That way, the microformat can automatically use information already available in the system - author details, organisation details, time of publication etc. - without requiring the author to do add additional information.
We have developed a number of News Credit modules for some of the more popular open source publishing tools such as Wordpress and Drupal. We are in the process of adapting these to create modules for proprietary CMSs.
Why use microformats?
A microformat is a simple set of conventions for web pages. It is designed to be human readable, but also to enable automatic extraction of the semantic information (for a background on microformats, see http://microformats.org)
Microformats are - as the originators explain:
“Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns.”
The principles of microformats fit very well with the principles underlying the news transparency initiative:
- Solve a specific problem
- Start as simple as possible
- Design for humans first, machines second
- Re-use building blocks from widely adopted standards
- Modularity/embeddability
- Enable and encourage decentralized development, content, services
Microformats are an open standard that can be easily supported by 3rd party application developers once the format is published, enabling writers and editors to easily generate microformats for their articles as an integrated step in the production process.
Microformats are also well-suited for programmers to “bring to life” using browser-based scripting language, such as Javascript. This is because the combination of mark-up and CSS class names enables any script to view the microformat as a distinct “object” on the page. The script will be able to “see” each part of the microformat even if it is hidden from the human user of the site, and interact with it or assign behaviours to it.
We also intend to identify the same information using RDFa but decided to start with microformats since they are easier to use and currently more well tested.
