[uf-discuss] mixing vocabularies

[Thomas Loertsch]

hi all,

a question: when contemplating over the feature set of hRecipe it occured to
me that i don't seem to get the rational of mixing vocabularies in all it's
subtleties. e.g. why should i add rel-tag to the hRecipe vocabulary when
people can use rel-tag anyway on any element they want to? likewise for
author and date. 
if i understand correctly the way meta information is added to the DOM
defines which elements are described. when investigating the use of hRecipe
i often found some top level div containing the recipe marked up with
classes hRecipe and some other vocabulary e.g. <div id="yet_another_recipe"
class="hrecipe vcard">. recipe specific elements where then marked up with
hrecipe vocabulary while the author was marked up as vcard. this seems like
a sensible approach to me. or does it make the job for parsers much harder?

that led to the idea of restructuring the hRecipe element set in a way that
the core element set remains the same (since in the editors opinion it
really features only those fields that are essential for describing a
recipe, and experience with implementation so far supports this view) but
the fields marked as "experimental" get re-labeled as "supplemental".
rational: they are considered useful and in common use for describing
recipes but they are not specific to recipes and already part of well
established vocabularies. therefor there use is encouraged and since they
are part of very popular vocabularies it's reasonable to expect that a
decent microformats parser will recognize and handle them properly. but they
are not intended to get a part of hRecipe now or at a future time.

i wonder if this is a viable approach? maybe it has been implemented in some
other microformat which i'm not aware of? or maybe there are reasons why it
shouldn't be pursued?

cheers
thomas


.
Thomas Lörtsch
Business Development
G+J Exclusive&Living digital GmbH
Redaktion Online
..
Stubbenhuk 5
20459 Hamburg
...
eMail: loertsch.thomas at guj.de