- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 23:48:47 +0000 (UTC)
One of the use cases I collected from the e-mails sent in over the past
few months was the following:
USE CASE: Site owners want a way to provide enhanced search results to the
engines, so that an entry in the search results page is more than just a
bare link and snippet of text, and provides additional resources for users
straight on the search page without them having to click into the page and
discover those resources themselves.
SCENARIOS:
* For example, in response to a query for a restaurant, a search engine
might want to have the result from yelp.com provide additional
information, e.g. info on price, rating, and phone number, along with
links to reviews or photos of the restaurant.
REQUIREMENTS:
* Information for the search engine should be on the same page as
information that would be shown to the user if the user visited the
page.
* Parsing rules should be unambiguous.
* Should not require changes to HTML5 parsing rules.
It seems like Microformats handle this case reasonably well, except for
the unambiguous parsing rules requirement. RDFa is what has been used by
Yahoo! and Google so far to get around this problem, but it has a number
of problems such as high authoring complexity, a close relationship to RDF
even in cases where RDF isn't desired, a reliance on prefix-based
declaration mechanisms, and a lack of a DOM-based definition. Microdata
seems to provide a compromise between the two that could satisfy the same
use cases, either with custom vocabularies or with community-created
vocabularies. It would be interested to get public feedback on this from
search engine vendors, though; are there aspects of RDFa that are
important here which I have missed?
--
Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Tuesday, 19 May 2009 16:48:47 UTC