Re: Last Call for Comments ... Re: proposal for updates to http://schema.org/Event

On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 11:50 AM, Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org> wrote:

> On 24 February 2012 16:39, Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org> wrote:
> > I've just posted another draft proposal in the W3C wiki,
> > http://www.w3.org/wiki/EventSchemaUpdate
> >
> > From the wrapper text there,
> >
> > "The proposal comes from the Google teams working with the existing
> > Event markup, and has been checked by the other schema.org partners
> > prior to publication. See PDF for full details of the proposal."
> >
> > * "Proposes 3 new properties of Event: eventStatus, previousStartDate,
> > previousEndDate to support canceled or rescheduled events.
> > * Adds eventCategory to support categorised events.
> > * Supports recurring events by making startDate and endDate repeated.
> > * Encourages use of existing 'url' property (of Thing) to link to
> > associated Web pages."
> >
> > Feedback as ever welcomed here or in the Wiki.
>
> OK, we didn't get a lot of discussion on this proposal. It has had
> some review elsewhere and is based on implementation feedback on the
> earlier deployed vocab so I suggest we wrap this one up quickly.
>
> Consider this a last call for comments on
> http://www.w3.org/wiki/EventSchemaUpdate, where btw the phrase 'Last
> Call' doesn't have the formality associated with official W3C
> standards. Rather it means, "hey, we're expecting to update schema.org
> based on this draft Real Soon Now and welcome your comments". Thanks
> for any feedback :)
>

my only concern with the proposal is the method proposed for matching
multiple startDate values to their corresponding endDate.  While the
schema.org vocabulary is first and foremost designed for representation as
microdata, that is by no means the only possible representation.  It's not
clear to me how much that should be a factor in defining the vocabulary.
 For example, when doing the JSON transformation as specified in the
microdata spec, you'd end up with:

{
  "type": "http://schema.org/Event"
  "properties": {
    "startDate": [ "2012-2-3", "2012-2-10", "2012-2-17" ],
    "endDate": [ "2012-2-5", "2012-2-12", "2012-2-19" ],
  }
}

JSON arrays are not necessarily ordered by definition, and different JSON
parsers behave differently in terms of maintaining order.  Even XML parsers
for that matter do not always maintain order.  Depending on what schema
language you use, I don't believe XML is necessarily ordered.  Does the
microdata spec provide any guidance in terms of element order, and whether
than can or should be relied upon to imply meaning to values?

-will