Container

A MicroContent Item needs a container in order to be exchanged and re-used. One can think of a file as a container. In order to encode the MicroContent Item into the file, one needs a format.

One can have two possibilities (2416):
1-1: Then a single MicroContent Item is encoded in a single file. The metadata of the file contains ifor instance information on the creation date/time and the author of the file. Enclosures in RSS-feeds are examples of such single Items (2228).
1-n: It is also possible to encode multiple MicroContent Items in a single file. This is then a MacroContent Container(2179). Each of these Items might be of a different MicroContent Type, i.e. Compound (2184).

An publisher might create many MicroContent Items. He could either create many containers, each for each item, or a single Container with all Items in a single file. There exists however a third possibility: the sliding view. A sliding view Containers has only a limited number of Items. Which Items are present in this sliding view Container, changes with time: new ones are added, old ones are removed.

The encoding method is based on a format, such as a MicroFormat (2207) or Structured Blogging. I will not discuss these formats (any many) others here. A problem is that for the same MicroContent Type multiple formats might exist (2614, 2374).