[uf-discuss] microformats as HTML5 microdata - example discussion

Tue Aug 17 20:05:07 PDT 2010

Hello,

I was reading 

http://microformats.org/wiki/microdata 

and did a small bit of thinking around the use of the item/itemprop 
attributes. I actually put a couple of examples in the wiki itself - but 
thought it would be polite to post here as well and ask for any feedback or 
potential issues. Apologies if this has been discussed before.

My examples were for an hCard:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>Corey Mwamba</title>
</head>
<body>
<section item="vcard" itemtype="http://microformats.org/profile/hcard" 
itemscope>
<h1 itemprop="fn">Corey Mwamba</h1>
<div itemprop="adr">
<p itemprop="street-address">56 Nowhere Road</p>
<p itemprop="locality">Nowhere</p>
<p itemprop="postal-code">NO1 6QT</p>
</div>
<a href="http://www.coreymwamba.co.uk/" itemprop="url">My web site</a>
</section>
</body>
</html>

And an hCalendar:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>Web 2.0 Conference</title>
</head>
<body>
<div item="vevent" itemtype="http://microformats.org/profile/hcalendar" 
itemscope>
 <a itemprop="url" 
href="http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/40/program.html">
  http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/40/program.html
 </a>
 <span itemprop="summary">Web 2.0 Conference</span>: 
 <time itemprop="dtstart" datetime="2005-10-05">October 5</time>-
 <time itemprop="dtend" datetime="2005-10-07">7</time>,
 at the <span itemprop="location">Argent Hotel, San Francisco, CA</span>
</div>
</body>
</html>

I was wondering: 

1. would the profile for microformats have to be re-written for a parser to be 
able to pick up the itemprops? 
1a. How hard is that to do?
1b. Would it be worth it?

2. Can the use of item attributes scale to the potential complexity of 
microformats? My initial thoughts were that it could - as stated on the page 
you could use itemref to include another item - but perhaps someone more 
technically minded can see an issue?

All the best,

C. 