I Blame Beer

hAtom has a much wider scope than most microformats. I’ve seen many cases when the answer to someone’s question about issues completely unrelated to syndication was “put it in an hAtom container” or “use attribute so and so from hAtom.” It is a generic microformat and in terms of scope is far from micro.

One possible example (which I need to find some time to create) is wrapping in hAtom all dynamic elements in a blog. So that every list of elements (xfn links, categories, etc.) can be consumed using the same semantics; The very least of which is ‘give me all contacts that have updated since a specific date.’

In other cases, I think it should be possible to use hAtom to define the scope of other microformats (especially rel-tag but also rel-directory and others).