Someone in the #mediawiki channel the other day asked, "Would it be possible to have easy-to-parse error messages?" and I thought, "Wow, that sounds like a microformat in the making."
Probably one of the most common HTML patterns in Web applications is error messages. We see them all the time on the Web: login errors, form validation errors, backend errors and user input errors. But what if this common pattern was standardized? If HTML error messages all followed a similar format, we could have browser plugins that recorded and analyzed the errors that come up. They could either feed back this structured error data when we needed it -- say, when filing a bug report -- or use the error data to help us find workarounds or documentation online.
I brought the idea up in the #microformats channel on Freenode, and it got a good response, so I took the next step and created a list of error message examples and some error message brainstorming on the microformats wiki. Hopefully this can be the start of some interesting feedback loops in software errors.
tags: errormessages microformats