Re: Inverse Properties in Microdata:, was Re: schema.org update, v1.8: added WebSite type; broadened isPartOf to relate CreativeWorks

Lin:

IMO, itemprop-reverse does not make Microdata more complex. It would just provide a simple modeling shortcut when the structure of a given HTML DOM does not match the direction of nesting in the vocabulary. No existing markup has to be changed after this proposal becomes available. No code generating markup has to be changed. If you do not need itemprop-reverse in Drupal templates or code, you can simply ignore it.

But there are cases where people want to add schena.org in Microdata syntax to existing templates and find that the given nesting of visible elements does not match the nesting needed from the direction of properties in schema.org. They may discover that itemprop-reverse is simpler in some cases and start to adopt it. 

It is agreed that the same can be achieved by itemid, but I argue that the mental complexity of this route is much higher for average Web developers. Also, using itemid in that sense breaks the simplicity of tree-based processing in the same way as itemprop-reverse (actually even more fundamentally, since you suddenly deal with a graph of named nodes, while itemref-reverse works even if you do not understand global entity identifiers).

Nobody has to learn Microdata anew after this proposal is in effect. Only a few parsers in libraries will have to be updated (but those updates are very minor in comparison to the changes from RDFa 1.0 to RDFa 1.1).


Best wishes / Mit freundlichen Grüßen

Martin Hepp

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martin hepp
e-business & web science research group
universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen

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On 05 Aug 2014, at 16:55, Lin Clark <lin.w.clark@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 5, 2014 at 9:22 AM, Markus Lanthaler <markus.lanthaler@gmx.net> wrote:
>  
> Microdata's major selling point is simplicity. It achieves that
> mostly by focusing on a single vocabulary and a tree-shaped data model.
> Reverse properties break that model. It is also not clear how they could be
> mapped to application/microdata+json as pointed out in another mail.
> 
> Thank you to Markus for pointing this out. 
> 
> I'm the creator of Microdata module for Drupal and MicrodataPHP (the most starred microdata parser written in PHP). I had been involved in the RDFa in Drupal work. I chose to develop tools for microdata instead due to its simplicity. 
> 
> If microdata turns into RDFa Lite-lite, then I won't have the spare cycles to maintain microdata tools. The more complexity that is added, the less maintainable the tools are for devs who don't have access to the resources of academia or the Schema.org partners.
> 
> FWIW, rev caused a lot of confusion for Drupal site builders. IIRC, it was removed as a configuration option in Drupal 8.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Lin Clark
> 
> lin-clark.com
> twitter.com/linclark

Received on Tuesday, 5 August 2014 15:20:49 UTC