Re: Microdata design philosophies

Hello again Ian

Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Oct 2009, Martin McEvoy wrote:
>   
>> Microdata is not "Designed for humans first and machines second".
>>     
>
> Actually, Microdata has very much been designed for humans first and 
> machines second. In fact, to underscore how important humans are in 
> Microdata's design, one member company of this working group has even gone 
> so far as to do usability testing of several variants of Microdata, to see 
> whether some of the proposals for changes to Microdata would actually have 
> beneficial effects. (Some did, some didn't. I've since updated the spec 
> based on what was learnt from those studies, as well as based on other 
> feedback regarding how to make the language easier for humans.)
>
>   

Really Microdata is designed for humans first you say well thats news to me?

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 ;)

Thanks anyway to your chums at google for the usability testing... I 
read your changes almost as soon as they happened, you did tell them 
what microdata is supposed to do didn't you?
>   
>> Microdata is not "a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing 
>> and widely adopted standards" (in fact quite the opposite really)
>>     
>
> Microdata is just a syntax. There are a couple of data formats build upon 
> existing and widely adopted standards (specifically the vCard and vEvent 
> vocabularies, strongly influenced by hCard and hCalendar) that have been 
> documented for use with Microdata, though.
>   
Why use microdata at all when microformats already exist,  I cant think 
of a single microdata use case that isn't already solved by microformats 
and RDFa, by the way microformats and RDFa work very niceley together on 
the same page, I would hate to try and mix micro data with microformats 
or RDFa

I have said this before I still don't think you will be landing any 
planes with microdata sorry.

Best wishes

-- 
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 Thursday, 15 October 2009 21:33:56 UTC