Re: Inverse Properties in Microdata:, was Re: schema.org update, v1.8: added WebSite type; broadened isPartOf to relate CreativeWorks

On 4 August 2014 18:41, Markus Lanthaler <markus.lanthaler@gmx.net> wrote:
> On 1 Aug 2014 at 09:10, Dan Brickley wrote:
>> On 1 August 2014 07:52, martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org
>> <martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org> wrote:
>>> There is a fully-fledged proposal to add inverse properties to microdata:
>>>
>>>     https://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/InverseProperties
>>> (as Jarno knows, for he was involved in the discussion ;-)
>>
>> And I well remember too. We had also already begun a discussion on the
>> WHATWG list, so the issue is well established.
>>
>>> Maybe we can ask Dan to look into this matter again? It would really help
>>> to have this feature.
>
> May I ask why? I thought the main feature of Microdata was its simplicity. Reverse properties are not exactly the simplest thing as this thread has shown. So why add them to Microdata? Why can't we simply recommend people to use RDFa for such "advanced" use cases? Do we want to evolve both formats in the future?
>
> Don't get me wrong, I'm not against adding this feature to Microdata at all. I'm just curious to understand the motivation and reasoning behind this effort.

Imagine you're running a large site, probably with chunks of it built
by people whose roles and even employer may have changed. Imagine it
has embedded Microdata throughout, and you're wondering whether to add
some additional information to match new schema.org vocabulary. For
people in this situation, throwing in a few more itemprops (and
reverse-itemprops) is a relatively simple, low risk option. Ripping it
all out to replace with RDFa (or JSON-LD) is going to be a much more
expensive and daunting operation. Hence the desire for a convention on
top of Microdata to match this (relatively niche and rarely used)
piece of syntax that RDFa and JSON-LD publishers already have.

Schema.org markup is published on millions and millions and millions
of sites now, almost entirely in Microdata notation. While I have no
desire to try to mutate Microdata into feature parity with RDFa, this
is one place where agreeing a syntax-level extension of classic
Microdata seems to be worthwhile.

cheers,

Dan

Received on Tuesday, 5 August 2014 12:08:14 UTC