[uf-discuss] re: HTML5 support

[Martin McEvoy]

  Oli Please don't get me wrong microdata does offer some interesting 
potential as far as microformats are concerned, It just needs looking at 
with "new eyes" and in a way that can help microformats *and* be 100% 
compatible with the way microformats exist now.
There are a couple of attributes that could really be useful to 
microformats, the itemscope attribute because its opaque, and itemref 
which very similar to the include pattern but better because it would 
allow an author to reference whole blocks of data not just a single 
property.

example, you could have the following markup somewhere in a page:

<span id="contact" class="vcard" itemscope>
<strong class="fn">Alfred Hitchcock</strong>
</span>

and add different parts of a page say in the footer....

<address itemref="contact" class="adr" itemscope>
<span class="street-address">1600 Amphitheatre Parkway</span> <br>
<span class="street-address">Building 43, Second Floor</span> <br>
<span class="locality">Mountain View</span>,
<span class="region">CA</span>
<span class="postal-code">94043</span>
</address>

I don't see any problem in microformats adopting only the parts of 
microdata that are useful to microformats, there are probably others who 
will disagree with that though ;-)

Best wishes.

Martin


On 14/07/2010 02:45, Martin McEvoy wrote:
>  Hello Oli ...
>
> On 13/07/2010 17:59, Oli Studholme wrote:
>> On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 5:13 AM, Martin 
>> McEvoy<martin at weborganics.co.uk>  wrote
>>> I wouldnt really be surprised to see microdata disappear all 
>>> together(but
>>> that's just my thought)
>> But how could microdata possibly disappear now that Google supports 
>> it? ;)
>
> Because Microdata is far to obtrusive to be practical in the "real 
> world" for example....
>
> Microdata vcard example from 
> http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/links.html#vcard
>
> <span itemscope itemtype="http://microformats.org/profile/hcard">
> <span itemprop=fn>
> <span itemprop="n">
> <span itemprop="given-name">George</span>
> <span itemprop="family-name">Washington</span>
> </span>
> </span>
> </span>
>
> 8 lines of code which would parse as:
>
> BEGIN:VCARD
> PROFILE:VCARD
> VERSION:3.0
> SOURCE:document's address
> FN:George Washington
> N:Washington;George;;;
> END:VCARD
>
> great you would think, now try that using microformats, example from 
> http://yiid.cc/3GI2
>
> <span class="vcard">
> <span class="fn">George Washington</span>
> </span>
>
> 3 lines of code which parses as:
>
> BEGIN:VCARD
> SOURCE:document's address
> NAME:document's title
> VERSION:3.0
> N;CHARSET=UTF-8:Washington;George;;;
> FN;CHARSET=UTF-8:George Washington
> END:VCARD
>
> from a commercial and practical point of view, microdata is definitely 
> not intended to be for "humans first" .
>
> Anyway believe what you like, microdata needs a *lot* of work before 
> it can ever be considered as  "micro" as far as I can see, at the 
> moment It just confuses people into using an unnecessary semantic.
>
> Best wishes
>


-- 
Martin McEvoy