:(
Word from NetNewsWire developer Brent Simmons is that the next update to the great OS X feed reader will drop microformats support. Quoting the post:
My favorite thing was deleting the microformats parsing code. Any CFXML-based code should be nuked. (I have no inside knowledge about CFXML being deprecated or anything — but it should be.)
It also means a slight performance boost when opening news items and web pages, as NetNewsWire now doesn’t look for embedded microformats. (It still looks for feeds in web pages, though, of course.)
Much of software development is a balancing act, and I can’t fault Brent for the choice here, but I also can’t help to feel a bit down on this loss.
I’ll happily admit that the large majority of feed items I see do not contain microformats, but for those that do include events, contact info or related info this was a great feature. Its important to note too, that with the use of RSS / Atom feeds for so much more then blog posts that there are some really great use cases for this functionality [feed of latest users added to an application being one example that comes to mind].
Some time ago — before this support had been added to NNW — “I had written some simple scripts to do microformat detection and extraction from feed items. Perhaps its time to resurrect that old code.
