[uf-discuss] hThing microformat ... or design pattern

[Eric Skiff]

---sorry if this gets posted a few times, i got some bouncebacks
because I didn't send in plaintext---

Hi everyone, I'm a little new here, so feel free to take this with a
grain of salt, but I definitely just had an "oh my god" moment about
this.

I think that the work you're doing right now on hItem could be some of
the most important microformat work yet. I'm sure you've already made
the connection I just came to, but here's why I'm excited.

hItem is a bit vague on purpose to make it flexible, but in general, i
think it will be most useful for describing physical goods. If, like
andy suggests, it has all the price information that a catalog entry
might have, I can easily see any list of products on amazon, froogle,
etc, being marked up with a combination of hItem and hListing.
Suddenly all the product listings on the web can become a database.

This could also make hReview much more powerful in my opinion,
assuming hItem is embeddable in the same way hCard is. Using our wine
example from before, you could just link to an hItem from the review.

I'd definitely advocate for hItem including information about its
creator, and optionally its producer and vendor. These of course could
be hCard entries or links, and I think it would give us a flexible way
to include much of the information that felt very "wine" specific such
as Vintage (aka, producer and production date). It seems as though an
hItem's production and creation could also be considered events, so
reusing hEvent here seems to make a lot of sense.

What do you think? Is this more complicated than it needs to be, or is
the reuse of other microformats here a good thing?

Also, is this ground already being covered by hListing (which seems to
be looking to include some of this info), or would you simply have
hListings of events (hEvent),  people (hCard), and  things (hItem)?

Thanks
-Eric

On 11/16/06, Andy Mabbett <andy at pigsonthewing.org.uk> wrote:
> In message <21e523c20611161514y84c665q93a56d44766a7aba at mail.gmail.com>,
> David Janes <davidjanes at blogmatrix.com> writes
>
> >- the price in a listing may be different that the "real" price/value
> >of an item (!)
>
> Then we need "price" (if not "price", "list-price", "offer-price",
> "minimum-bid", "current-bid", etc.) and "value".
>
> It should be possible, of course, to label all of these, and especially
> the latter, with a date (-time).
>
> --
> Andy Mabbett
>                 Say "NO!" to compulsory ID Cards:  <http://www.no2id.net/>
>
>                 Free Our Data:  <http://www.freeourdata.org.uk>
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-- 
Eric Skiff
Nonprofit Web & Database Admin, Consultant,
Podcaster, Pinko Marketer
718-809-8692

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