Re: Schema.org property cardinality and use of plural (WAS Re: SoftwareApplication proposal for schema.org)

With the caveat that I'm new here and probably don't know what I'm talking about, this plural/list usage does not look like a good idea, as it requires anyone who wants to make use of the data to understand that it needs to parse and split on the comma.  Which is easy enough in this example but can become very complex in terms of quoting and escaping, at which point people are likely to write things improperly quoted/escaped making the data worthless.  It's much much easier to say that all formatting/parsing should be handled by the actual markup syntax (in this case HTML) and values are treated as-is.

I guess this would make for more verbose HTML markup as you'd need to wrap each OS in a <span itemprop="operatingSystem"></span>, but I think it's much more clean.

thanks,
-henry



>________________________________
> From: Adrian Giurca <giurca@tu-cottbus.de>
>Subject: Re: Schema.org property cardinality and use of plural (WAS Re: SoftwareApplication  proposal for schema.org)
> 
>
>When Text is expected I would say that both string and distinct markup should be allowed. Asa such the below may work too:
>
><div itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/SoftwareApplication">
>  <p itemprop="operatingSystems">OSX 10.6, Windows 7</p>
>...
>
></div>
>
>and a potential Schema processor should be advised. Of course,
      this can solved much better  by introducing cardinalities on Schema.org
>Introducing cardinalities will not put any pressure on possible
      existent Schema.org consumers.
>However, one should be advised that object oriented software
      design has a long tradition on using plural to introduce
      collections of things.
>
>-Adrian  Giurca 
>
>