Re: Microdata design philosophies

Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
> Martin McEvoy On 09-10-15 23.59:
>
>> Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>>> On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 4:33 PM, Martin McEvoy 
>>> <martin@weborganics.co.uk> wrote:
>>>  
>>>> Itemscope, itemprop, itemref...etc..etc don't sound human friendly 
>>>> at all,
>>>> If microdata were ever to become popular ( god forbid ) think of all
>>>> gigabaytes of data that's going to take up just because you thought 
>>>> that
>>>> pre-pending everything with "item" was somehow intuitive, and TBL 
>>>> worries
>>>> about forward slashes, Im suprised you can sleep at night ;)
>>>>     
>>> You kidding?  Prepending everything is *awesome*, because it
>>> immediately calls out that this is a group of related attributes.
>>> Since they're all global attributes, it's useful to have an immediate
>>> visual clue about what you're dealing with.  It also lets you avoid
>>> worrying about name collisions with existing attributes.
>>
>> If you say so tab ;)
>
> On this particular issue, I agree with Tab that it is practical that 
> they all begin with the same "prefix" - item*.

Again if you say so, I don't agree sorry, the word "item" is 
semantically barren to me, it means nothing (don't tell me that was the 
intention?).
>
> It is like with namespaces and namespace prefixes - simple and 
> effective. Easy for authors to understand.

you sound like a RDFa advocate from that last statement ;)

>
> I'm glad to see that a Google internal research has proved it.

Google internal research has proved what exactly?

The entire microdata proposal so far to me is Bogus semantics, the worst 
kind of "cargo cultism" I've seen in a very long time

look at this example:

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/microdata.html#the-basic-syntax

<div itemscope id="amanda"><itemref refid="a"><itemref refid="b"></div>
<p id="a">Name: <span itemprop="name">Amanda</span></p>
<div id="b" itemprop="band" itemscope id="jazzband"><itemref refid="c"></div>
<div id="c">
 <p>Band: <span itemprop="name">Jazz Band</span></p>
 <p>Size: <span itemprop="size">12</span> players</p>
</div>


What is the above example trying to attempt?
What does itemscope mean?
look at those funny little bits of mark up <itemref refid="a"><itemref 
refid="b">, do itemref and refid confuse you? again what do they mean?
Look at every bit of content for example <span 
itemprop="size">12</span>, what does size mean or band or any of the 
attribute contents?
How Is a newcomer to HTML or the semantic web going to make of all that?
Does the above seem a little much just to mark up around 18 characters 
of data?
Do you think a search engine will understand the above example, knowing 
that they cant reason like humans.

It ridiculous, and it gets worse the further along you get. its an ugly 
specification, totally unexpected from a learned community.

Thanks.

-- 
Martin McEvoy

http://weborganics.co.uk/

"You may find it hard to swallow the notion that anything as large and apparently inanimate as the Earth is alive."
Dr. James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia

Received on Friday, 16 October 2009 21:20:19 UTC