[microformats-discuss] Re:ratings

[Peter Jones]

Kevin Marks wrote:

> Peter, do look at hReview, which details a way of
> expressing tagged ratings in a microformat:

Thanks for pointing out hReview - I have looked at it
and there were a couple of reasons why I thought
VoteLinks was more suitable/applicable:

1. Reviews require quite a lot of effort to compile
(when compared to ratings) so capturing ratings under
a
*Review* microformat could put some people off. This
may reduce the amount of ratings data created by
users.

2. Whilst it is possible to strip out the body of the
review from hReview in order to use tags as criteria
against which to make ratings, there is still this
issue of using the "rel" or "rev" attribute.

So, stripping down the Multidimensional Restaurant
hReview example provided in hReview would leave the
restaurant url,

<a class="url"
href="http://cafeborrone.com">cafeborrone.com</a>

and the rating (which in this case is for food),

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food"
rel="tag">Food: <span class="rating">18</span>/<span>
class="best">30</span></a>

This may work fine, but is based on the tag assumption
that an external tagspace is required to define the
tag, hence the use of rel="tag". All I am looking to
do
is indicate a criterion against which to make the
rating of an external resource, and I doubt it needs
to
go as far as having a defined tagspace.

Could ratings be done more simply if structured along
the lines of VoteLinks? So, for example:

<a rev="vote-for" href="http://ragingcow.blogspot.com"
title="neat spoof">Raging Cow</a>

could be coded as:

<a rev="rating" href="http://ragingcow.blogspot.com"
title="4outof5">Spoof</a>

This could indicate a rating of *4outof5* for the
resource http://ragingcow.blogspot.com against the
criteria of *Spoof*. A selection of criteria, each
with
their own rating, could be highly informative and are
relatively easy to code. If such information were
included in a blog or website, that would serve as the
proxy for the person who wrote it and the time of the
blog entry would correspond to the time of the rating.

I think this issue of using *rel* for tags (i.e.
incoming tags) to say something about a post could be
confusing if people want to use tags as criteria for
rating an external resource along the lines of the
*rev* attribute. So it may be best if I avoid the idea
of using a *tag* as the criteria against which to make
a rating for an external resource, and just stick to
establishing rating criteria of some sort without
calling it a tag.

Anyway, back to why I joined this list - are there any
plans for a simple rating microformat that just
records
the resource being rated as the destination of a link,
the rating, and the criteria against which the
resource
has been rated? I'm assuming the rater ID and the time
of the rating would be indicated by the website/blog
where the rating was posted.

Many thanks,

Peter.










		
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