Re: ISSUE-76: Need feedback on splitting Microdata into separate specification

On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 5:40 PM, Shelley Powers <shelley.just@gmail.com> wrote:
> Cool, we'll stop talking about you-know-what then.

Well, as I said, it's still probably not possible to avoid talking
about it entirely, as Manu's change proposal is mostly concerned with
it.  But let's avoid it as much as possible, sure.


> Of your points, there are at least a couple, if I remember correctly
> that basically says let's put everything into HTML5. I responded on
> that, which triggered a different thread.
>
> I did want to say, though, that I disagree with the idea that let's
> put it into HTML5, and if it fails, we can always pull it out in a
> later version of HTML.

Indeed, that's my idea.  It seems like a good idea, the current editor
of HTML5 supports it, and history shows that it is indeed pretty easy
to yank sections when they turn out to be a bad idea or otherwise turn
out to be unimplementable.


> You mention how the tree like structure of Microdata works well with
> JSON. Do you have pointers to applications and libraries that supports
> your assertion? In fact, do you have links to any applications and
> libraries that support Microdata, other than Philip's proof of
> concept?

I felt it was obvious.  JSON very naturally handles tree structures;
to be more accurate, JSON very naturally handles nested sets of
key/value pairs.  JSON is an extremely popular, easy, and useful data
storage/transfer format to use in javascript.  Microdata is explicitly
a set of nested key/value pairs.  Thus a blob of HTML with Microdata
has an obvious and easy mapping to an intuitive JSON data structure
containing that data.  Even when dealing with a triplestore like RDF
Microdata provides an easy way to map this 3-tuple abstraction into
JSON's 2-tuple assumptions, not to mention HTML's 2-tuple abstraction
of attributes (HTML with attributes also functions naturally as a
nested set of key/value pairs, in the obvious way).  Because Microdata
respects HTML's natural abstraction, and this maps trivially to JSON's
natural abstraction, it all works together very happily.

~TJ

Received on Saturday, 5 December 2009 00:12:20 UTC