[microformats-discuss] a micro micro-format for an' item'

[David Janes -- BlogMatrix]

S. Sriram wrote:

> Well than if you were able to map than what differs is merely
> the naming convention and not the conceptual aspect of
> the elements.
> 
> If that were to be the case than why not settle on a
> common naming convention (where possible & applicable) 
> for the core elements of a generic item ? 
> 
> The argument you make for this is not to have a
> 
>>premature commitment to any kind of top-down semantics.
> 
> 
> What if there at least existed 'a suggested' guideline rather 
> than an enforced commitment ?

OK, let's set aside the conceptual idea that there's no such thing as a 
generic item.

One common design pattern we're using is that we're building upon 
existing standards, existing knowledge. Thus, when we talk about hcard 
we can send you to vcard for the hard details; likewise hcalendar for 
vcalendar. In the blog-post format, I'm attempting to build upon the 
work of the Atom group, which spent years (good god) hammering this 
stuff out. If the concurrent discussion about media goes ahead, they'll 
probably build on Media RSS.

Let's discuss generic items:

So ... are we dealing with 'item's or 'entry's? If I'm using Atom as 
guideline, I'll have to carve out an exception in the spec to say "I'm 
using 'item' as the word to talk about entries because we decided that 
all generic things are 'items', even though Atom says 'entry' and we're 
using Atom terminology everywhere else".

So ... are we dealing with 'content'? If you're looking at search 
results on a Google page, the 'content' there corresponds to the Atom 
concept of 'summary' and _definitely_ not Atom's content which needs to 
be complete. Please see [1] for more details -- it's quite interesting.

Well, at least we have 'title' to fall back on. Except, of course, 
someone thinks we need to standardize something in the future around 
RFC822 ('subject') or OPML ('text') or ...

Regards, etc...
David

[1] http://microformats.org/wiki/blog-post-brainstorming#Content