Re: Comments on HTML Microdata, W3C Working Draft 24 June 2010

On 12/7/10 12:47 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Dec 2010, Nathan wrote:
>> Ian Hickson wrote:
>>> I've used dce: and dct:, since now the example has both.
>> A general comment, microdata appears to be incredibly verbose for
>> authors when using multiple vocabularies to describe things, the example
>> at http://dev.w3.org/html5/md/#examples is almost painful to read, let
>> alone write.
>>
>> Is there no way to reduce the repetition of long URIs for properties and
>> types as illustrated by the Turtle equivalent in the referred to
>> example? Does HTML or Microdata cater for this in any way?
> When we did the usability studies for this we found that in practice (and
> much to my surprise) the verbosity had no impact on the usability of the
> language, so we didn't do anything to reduce it.

When you did that usability study, if I remember correctly, there was 
only 6 test subjects, all Google employees, and I believe volunteers. 
That does not make a study you can extrapolate from.

> Furthermore, in practice, most use cases for microdata don't involve
> multiple vocabularies but a single vocabulary explicitly named using
> itemtype="", for which the vocabulary's short names are used.
>
Actually, I don't think there is any "practice". I've not seen microdata 
used in the wild. Not to say there isn't, but I've not seen it.

Shelley