the microformat community are generally unfriendly

I think people are more than willing to help out if you have problems. At conferences and events you can always approach microformats folks and have a chat. You might be confusing 'unfriendly' with 'pragmatic' or something else - on the whole everyone i have met has been more than generous with their time and knowledge.

I should have been more specific. On the mailing list people seem to be mostly too-clever-by-half. As I say, 2 people have complained to me about it.

Same could probably be said about Jyte, Wikipedia, etc. Mob mentality, comfort, seniority... all play a role. Look at how Vynce and Rachel are perceived by newcomers for example.

It's only natural.

About the microformat community, I personally feel quite welcomed there. So you better be nice to me nic, or I'm storming out of here! I will!

It's a shame here changed... I felt very welcomed when I arrived. The current Mayor had a lot to do with that.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I consider myself a newbie here, but feel very welcome, if not totally understood. There was a claim recently about feeling both excited and worried about the coming Jyte popularity. It's something I'd like to probe a little deeper actually.

jyte has established itself so quickly as a vibrant and exciting place - I can empathise with the fear but don't share it. It will scale or it will not. I don't really believe that it just so happens that the most interesting people in the world gathered here already... there must be more interesting people to join up yet. And with every idiot there's a comedy value.

You see! I think that's (at least partly) because they are all very arrogant. Very clever, yes. But very arrogant.

It's a bad thing and they're turning non-technie's off microformats.

I think the problem with my claim is that everybody here is a really smart person and will be welcomed into the Microformat community because of that.

But if it's to be a success you have to accept and cope with the slightly less smart. Just like Java did. Rememeber Gosling's line about the target market for Java?

"Java is a language for medium ability programmers"

I seem to remember it's actually stated in some documentation like the forewood to the language spec or something.

Being dyslexic severely affects my writing skills, which often makes me appear less intelligent and also frequently makes me feel less intelligent than I really am. I do not always express myself well in writing. This frequently gets me ignored or even worse, put down as some dim wit and I am normally told to go rtfm. When in fact I have read it several times already but still have some dam questions.

This has happened to me rarely here in Jyte, but usually more often in some of the other more snooty programming sites I visit in hopes of picking up some more of my bare bones programming skills. I often just lurk for a long time in those kinds of sites before I ever try to ask a question, in hopes of learning enough to not sound like such a dumb n00bie.

The techno-speak in those kinds of places makes me nervous, I do not think microformats is any worse than java, xml, rdf, foaf, or xhtml. To make matters worse I am not really a IT person, I am a psychology/human services major, I guess I am just some kind of a weird geekie/techno-nerd wantabe.

It would be unforgiveable if someone thought Mark-White was a dim-wit. That's just absurd.

But that's the trouble, it's dim-wits who think these things.