Maintaining mf2py

mf2py, the official Python microformats parser, is now under active development. After a hiatus without a lead maintainer, a few community members and I have coordinated to help drive the package through a series of updates.

Over the last week, I have been working with contributors on new documentation and charting a path toward deprecating Python 2 support, which was consumed by a few applications. Indeed, backwards compatability has been at the heart of microformats: standards require long-term, robust support. We collectively decided that the work required to maintain support would have been extensive, while holding us back from taking on an important task: modernize the library.

We published the last version of mf2py that supports Python 2, v1.1.3, this week. Now, work begins on modernizing the repository. Angelo, Kevin, Ryan, Sven, Tantek, and others have helped review code and weigh in to various parts of this process. The continuous integration process now works again, allowing us greater visibility into test compliance. The test suite now runs on pytest. We are working toward ensuring consistent code style.

Furthermore, mf2py now has a documentation website with information on how to use the parser, a few quickstart examples and auto-generated documentation for the main Parser class.

Over the long-term, I am excited to see what new features we can add to the package in response to user feedback. This week, I plan to implement a long-requested change: allow parsing srcset attributes on images, per the algorithm outlined in the microformats parsing specification GitHub repository.

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