Re: ITS as a microformat (proposal)

Hi Jirka,


2009/7/1 Jirka Kosek <jirka@kosek.cz>

> Felix Sasaki wrote:
>
> > I have made some rapid prototyping about implementing ITS as a
> microformat.
> > http://docs.google.com/View?id=dch8cn8g_20hrxhkmd8
> > Comments and answers to the open questions are very welcome.
>
> Hi Felix,
>
> thanks for proposal. I think that it might be useful to provide not only
> one proposal using "classical" uF syntax, but also one based on RDFa and
> on HTML5 syntax of microformats. I think that now it is not yet clear
> which syntax will be mainstream in future, so we should open ITS to as
> much wide audience as possible.


Agree. This is just a first start, and the other formats you mention are
clearly in scope for other syntaxes. I am just trying to get a feeling for
some problems (e.g. local markup) first.


>
>
> I'm not convinced that it makes sense to have microformat for rules.
>
> 1) It will became visible part of document (and although it can be make
> unvisible in CSS, it will confuse search engines and other agents
> operating only on markup).


Isn't that the same problem with other  microformats, e.g. hcard?


>
> 2) Does user really need to create rules for general HTML content?



Not sure ... though I do not see the difference to the use case of shipping
"native" ITS rules in a seperate document - is there a difference? Or are
you saying that that is also no use case and users do not need to create
also native ITS rules for HTML?


>
>
> 3) There is tricky XPath part. Rules without prefixes will not work in
> XHTML content because XHTML elements are in namespace. Moreover HTML5
> spec moves also HTML elements into XHTML namespace and it is currently
> trying to bend XPath inside HTML5 content to use unprefixed element
> names to select elements from XHTML namespace.



That is indeed tricky. One workaround could be to propose that users of
rules use only tests for local names. That leads to akward XPath
expressions, but it would work. Anyway, I do not see the difference to
global "native" ITS rules, see my reply to 2).



>
>
> But it is definitively worth to create uF for local ITS data categories.



Yes - do you have any input on the problems I mentioned at "open questions"
http://docs.google.com/View?id=dch8cn8g_20hrxhkmd8
?

Thanks,

Felix


>
>
>                        Jirka
>
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