- From: Edward O'Connor <hober0@gmail.com>
- Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:50:18 -0700
- To: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
- Cc: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>, Shelley Powers <shelleyp@burningbird.net>, public-html@w3.org
Hi, Maciej Stachowiak wrote: > Does anyone agree with the inclusion of the microdata section? In > particular, does anyone think microdata is better than including no > solutions to address the use cases at which it is aimed? I do. I think the microdata attributes round out HTML's existing extensibility points, so that HTML provides sufficient hooks for distributed extensibility while avoiding any unnecessary complexity. (HTML, of course, has many existing extensibility points. I think microdata provide enough of the missing extensibility bits such that we can close ISSUE-41 now.) As background info, I'm a sometimes-participant in the microformats community, and have been since its inception. While I don't speak for the microformats community, that's the direction from which I'm viewing HTML5's microdata features. Microformats currently use the language extension mechanisms present in HTML 4: @profile (de jure, anyway; in practice, microformats processors don't rely on profile), @class, meta@name, @rel, and the like. As I've said elsewhere[1]: > Microformats are a great example of a community coming together and > taking advantage of HTML's existing extensibility points[…] > microformats thrive within the constraints of HTML's existing > extensibility points. > > HTML5's microdata proposal isn't some kind of competing way to mark up > data, it's a change to the underlying language extension mechanisms. > In the future, when microformats are defined on top of HTML5[2], they > will be able to take advantage of microdata attributes > (@item, @itemprop, and the like), its unambiguous data extraction > algorithm, as well as other new bits of HTML5 (e.g. the <time> > element). Jonas Sicking was looking for "feedback from people designing microdata- like syntaxes (such as the microformat community)." I hope the above helps. Jonas wrote: > However I definitely would like to see the Predefined vocabularies > removed from the spec and instead let them fight on their own merits. > I think they are completely independent to the rest of the spec and > thus nothing would be lost by having them in their own spec. My understanding is that the predefined vocabularies were included in the HTML5 spec because they interact with other HTML5 features: drag-and-drop, conversion of HTML into RDF/JSON/vCard/other formats, etc. That said, I think these vocabularies could be (and perhaps should be) usefully extracted from the spec. In the case of the vCard, vEvent, and BibTeX vocabularies, their specification in microdata resembles how I expect the hCard, hCalendar, and citation microformats to look when reformulated for HTML5. Perhaps these vocabularies could be extracted and work continued on them within the microformats community, assuming willing editors can be found. James Graham wrote: > Compared to microformats I believe the HTML 5 microdata offers more > consistent parsing rules (a single parser can unambiguously parse all > microdata, allowing features such as automatic conversion to RDF) and > cleaner seperation from the rest of the markup language. Indeed. Robin Berjon wrote: > It certainly is an interesting extension point, enough that I'm > looking into changing some of the XML formats I use to > XHTML5+microdata. Yes. As I said above, I believe microdata rounds out HTML's extensibility points nicely, which should help with any efforts to author reusable semantic HTML (such as microformats or poshformats[3]). -- Edward O'Connor 1. http://edward.oconnor.cx/2009/05/microdata-microformats-and-rdf 2. http://microformats.org/wiki/html5 3. http://microformats.org/wiki/posh#poshformats
Received on Monday, 29 June 2009 18:56:59 UTC