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

[David Janes]

On 11/17/06, Eric Skiff <microformats at glitchnyc.com> wrote:
> 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.

I'm not sure if I'm that excited :-) but I definitely think there's a
gap that can be filled (i.e. that hReview/hListing identify people
directly but only things indirectly). It's possible, but this is very
speculative, that this could simplify the path for creating new
microformats like hWine.

> 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.

There's an analogous problem here with linking hCards (such as Ryan
King's on the microformats blog) to a "better" hCard (Ryan King's
official one).

> 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?

Let's go through the examples and see what's frequently used, somewhat
used and rarely or sporadically used. That will point the right
direction I think. And, as per usual, I encourage everyone to
contribute to the examples because that's one of the hardest and least
thanked parts.

> 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)?

The latter, but we're data mining hListing/hReview to maximize reuse.

>
> Thanks
> -Eric

-- 
David Janes
Founder, BlogMatrix
http://www.blogmatrix.com
http://www.onamine.com
http://blogmatrix.blogmatrix.com