hProduct comments (was Re: [uf-discuss] Some (newbie) questions on microformats)

[stephen mulcahy]

Hi Scott,

Thanks for your reply.

Scott Reynen wrote:
> On Jan 25, 2007, at 3:01 PM, stephen mulcahy wrote:
>
> ...
>> ....
>> I guess in most cases this info is already on manufacturers websites,
>> but its certainly not amenable to scraping and parsing semantically (and
>> maybe its not in the interests of the manfacturers to provide the
>> information in a format that lets me easily compare them to other
>> manufacturers) but it strikes me that if they did .. it would be really,
>> really easy for me to go to all the major manufacturers websites, suck
>> them their microformatted data and then analyse it off line - I see
>> something like an openoffice datapilot table (microsoft excel pivot
>> table) where I can click various filters to match my criteria above and
>> sort the output according to something like price and voila, my choices
>> are obvious - is there a microformat that lends itself to this sort of
>> thing already.
>>
>> Is this the kind of scenario that microformats could meet or am I way
>> off of the mark?
>
> See hProduct and hListing:
>
> http://microformats.org/wiki/product
> http://microformats.org/wiki/hlisting
>
> These have been in progress for a while, and if you're interested in
> this area, I'd encourage you to review the process, look at what's
> missing in the wiki, and try to move this forward to a microformat that
> will suit your needs.
>

I've taken a look at hProduct and it sounds like it "kind of" matches my
requirements, or is a start in that direction.

I'm not sure about using the 'p-v' class for capturing the details  of
each different product type though - in effect the existing hProduct
proposal is a proposal for how to define hProduct microformats (since
the 'meat' of a hProduct microformat for any particular type of product
 will be in the 'p-v' class ... but maybe thats where we need to start.

I wonder should I start by proposing a set of p-v's that could be used
to describe notebooks and work from there?

I guess the hard part is going to be getting someone (ideally a
manufacturer) to adopt the format - anyone out there working for any of
the big notebook makers? :)

-stephen

-- 
stephen at skynet.ie                             http://www.skynet.ie/~stephen/