Re: Data blocks, not marked up content

Thanks Gavin,

On 4 Oct 2011, at 20:30, Gavin Carothers wrote:
> One of the use cases for both Microdata and RDFa (but not
> microformats) is the exchange of data that is NOT displayed. Perhaps
> they should not try and meet this use case.

I agree this looks like something that users are likely to come up against and that there are several approaches for how they might handle the requirement:

  * use empty <div>s and <span>s (and other elements) in the body of the page -- empty <a> elements are bad for accessibility iirc
  * use microdata/RDFa markup in the head of the document (which has limitations because of the lack of nesting of <meta> elements, though see [1])
  * include the data in an alternate syntax (Turtle / RDF/XML / microdata+json etc) within <script> elements in the <head> as you suggest
  * link to an alternative format through rel="alternate" <link> element with an appropriate type to indicate the format
  * use AJAX requests to pull in data in other formats as required

Would you be able to write this up within the wiki at [2], do you think, with your example? In particular, it would be good to answer the question of when it *is* a good idea to embed data within HTML rather than embedding/linking off to data in a different format. For example:

  * accessible by consumers that understand embedded markup but not other formats
  * drag/droppable along with content
  * if there's other markup in the page about these things, using it for hidden data is consistent

Thanks,

Jeni

[1]: http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=14112
[2]: http://www.w3.org/wiki/HTML_Data_Use_Cases
-- 
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com

Received on Thursday, 6 October 2011 19:30:11 UTC