Re: microdata use cases and Getting data out of poorly written Web pages

On Sun, 10 May 2009, Ben Adida wrote:
> 
> The proposal is up, and, as Creative Commons rep, I cannot live with it 
> (it's not even close, frankly.)
> 
> First, this gratuitously ignores much existing spec work and much 
> existing deployment (Yahoo, CC, MySpace, Slideshare, the UK government, 
> the US government, etc.)

On the contrary, it was heavily influenced by the experiences of all the 
above and more.


> with a number of use cases that are simply not taken into account (Manu 
> has discussed these at length on the WHATWG list).

If there are specific use cases I somehow missed when going through the 
hundreds of e-mails on this topic, please bring them up, as I would be 
glad to make sure all use cases have been addressed.

As a reminder, the use cases I examined (including those that I explicitly 
couldn't find solutions for) are all listed in the e-mails listed here:

   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009May/0207.html


> When another spec solves the problem and has been deployed by 
> significant players, the first step is to consider how that spec can be 
> integrated to the fullest extent.

Indeed; I examined all the existing solutions that I could find closely as 
the first step (well, the second step, after collecting use cases). I 
didn't go through all of them one by one in the e-mail, but I did 
explicitly examine Microformats and RDFa:

   http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-May/019681.html


> So, I cannot live with something that throws away existing important 
> implementations of the *exact* same use cases for no valid technical 
> reason.

I believe that the above e-mails include ample technical justification for 
these decisions.


> The cost to existing implementors is far too high.

The cost to implementations for the existing proposed solutions was in 
fact one of the big factors in developing a new proposal.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Tuesday, 9 June 2009 01:30:50 UTC