I'm somewhat of a newb though with extracting microformat style metadata, so its quite possible there is a better way, or some higher level parsing library I could use (Something like xpath maybe, although its not really xml I'm looking at).
I am not really proficient with that either ; but yes I used Xpath in two projects (one prototype Wordpress extension [1], one draft Zotero plugin [2]) before to retrieve Commons metadata. Seems to me it’s less shaky. For a good example see the (better) one made by Zotero folks : < https://github.com/zotero/translators/blob/master/Wikimedia%20Commons.js%3E
And yes, as Derk-Jan says, do remember we can re-markup everything if needed :)
-- Jean-Fred
[1] Just overviewed that one: < https://github.com/CommonsOnCMS/CommonsOnCMS/blob/master/wp-wikimedia/wp-wik...
[2] < https://github.com/JeanFred/translators/blob/master/Wikimedia%20Commons.js%3...