[uf-discuss] Media Metadata, Specifically Video Thumbnails

[Ben Ward]

On 16 Aug 2006, at 22:46, Steve Williams wrote:
> I don't want to do something that might influence a bunch of sites  
> if it would hurt the Microformats effort.

I wouldn't be too worried about that. The Microformats process  
(http://microformats.org/wiki/process)  says that µf are built  
wherever possible on _existing_ behaviour.

So what you need to look for is whether other sites that use  
thumbnails for images or video are using a reproducing scheme. As  
Charles says, class=thumbnail is common and has been discussed before  
somewhere.

However, if evidence is in short supply, your best move is to think  
carefully about what information Digg needs to glean from pages  
(video format and identification of thumbnail images have been  
identified in this thread so far, but you may have other  
requirements: captions? titles? copyright?) and then work out the  
best scheme in HTML you can. It wouldn't be a microformat in an  
official sense but it would be evidence towards building one in the  
future (especially on a site as big as Digg).

I'm sure there are lots of very wise and knowledgeable people here  
who'd be happy to provide input if you were to draft such a scheme,  
although I'm not 100% sure if that would be on-topic.

Also try to think within the bounds of raw HTML. Can the thumbnail  
‘functionality’ you desire be achieved without any class name  
additions? What about an IMG, nested within an A that links to a  
video file? Is that sufficient? (from a few seconds thought it isn't,  
since it could be an image as part of navigation, not a thumbnail at  
all, but it's the principal I'm trying to demonstrate).

Best of luck,

Ben