Absorbing Microdata

Here's an interesting idea from Sebastian Heath via Twitter:

> sebastianheath: Has anybody thought about merging rdfa and microdata >
via @itemprop? So that itemprop/property are interchangeable. #rdfa
> #microdata

It's interesting because I can almost see an alternative document that
tells RDFa processors how to interpret Microdata markup via the RDFa
Processing rules. Note that this would be a document that is completely
external to RDFa Core, XHTML+RDFa, and HTML+RDFa.

The preliminary updates to the processing rules in an external document
that would allow this to happen are below. Here is the translation table
from Microdata to RDFa:

Microdata        RDFa
---------        ----
itemscope        typeof=""
itemref          about="#ITEMREF_VALUE" or about="FULL_URI"
itemtype         typeof="ITEMTYPE_VALUE" (OVERRIDES itemscope)
itemprop         property="FULL_URI" or property="MODDED_ITEMPROP_VAL"

where MODDED_ITEMPROP_VAL is "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#" +
attribute value of itemprop.

There are still problems with nesting itemprops/itemscopes and the types
that Microdata has specified for vcard, vevent and work... don't know if
anybody else has looked at this yet. Just throwing it out there.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Saving Journalism - The PaySwarm Developer API
http://digitalbazaar.com/2010/09/12/payswarm-api/

Received on Wednesday, 15 September 2010 03:20:22 UTC