[microformats-discuss] Re:ratings

[Ryan King]

On Jul 27, 2005, at 8:27 AM, Peter Jones wrote:

> 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.

Right, its quite possible that you wouldn't want to use the entire  
hReview format. But I think Kevin was trying to point out the part of  
hReview where you can markup rated tags.

> 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.

I'm not sure what the issue is here. Could you elaborate?

> 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,

Yes.

> 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.

Why couldn't you reuse an existing 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>

Why hide the 4outof5 in the title?

> 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.

I think I've just realized what you're trying to accomplish here. It  
appears you're trying to figure out a way to apply tags (with a  
rating) to an external resource.

If so, have you looked at xFolk [http://microformats.org/wiki/xfolk] ?

-ryan

> 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.