[uf-new] re: Microformats support for aggregate reviews

[Kavi Goel]

Hi all,

Here is a quick update on conversations around microformats aggregate
reviews support. I've updated the aggregate-review-brainstorming wiki
page based on our IRC conversation a few weeks ago:
http://microformats.org/wiki/aggregate-review-brainstorming

The short summary of the proposal that emerged from the discussion
over IRC is as follows:
- define a new microformat that contains two elements. 1) number of
reviews, and 2) an embedded hReview
- fields in the embedded hReview (i.e. rating, summary, item type)
would refer to aggregate information. For example, the rating is the
average rating across all reviews.

Why this proposal?
- the new microformat would contain only one element (at least in an
initial version) to keep things simple according to the 80% rule
- creating a new microformat rather than extending hReview provides
flexibility to potentially add more aggregate-only fields in the
future without cluttering hReview.

If this approach seems like a good one, Jay Myers and/or I will also
add a few examples of how this markup could look for some sites.

One issue we ran into when trying to apply this to Best Buy and Amazon
pages -- on many pages, the entire page is about a product, whereas
only a section of the page is about the reviews. On the other hand,
for sites like Yelp, the entire page is about the reviews, and only a
section of the page is about the product spec. So it probably makes
sense to allow embedded reviews in hProduct's as well as embedded
hProduct's in hReview's depending on the hierarchy that naturally
exists on the page.

Kavi


On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 4:02 PM, Kavi Goel <kavi at google.com> wrote:
>
> In order to move this discussion about aggregate reviews along, I'd
> like to have a discussion over IRC. As a heads-up, I'll plan on
> discussing alternatives around 2PM Pacific time tomorrow. For folks in
> different timezones who will be out enjoying the nightlife, sleeping
> or otherwise away from a computer, please feel encouraged to post
> ideas via this email discussion or on the brainstorming wiki here:
> http://microformats.org/wiki/aggregate-review-brainstorming
>
> Thanks,
> Kavi
>
> On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 12:48 AM, Toby A Inkster <mail at tobyinkster.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> > Jamie Rumbelow wrote:
> >
> >> See, comments like that lead me on to think that we need some form of
> >> pagination system for microformats - pagination is much more popular among
> >> sites these days and a rel="paginate" might come in handy.
> >
> > HTML already has perfectly good rel="next"/"prev" for that.
> >
> > http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#type-links
> >
> > --
> > Toby A Inkster
> > <mailto:mail at tobyinkster.co.uk>
> > <http://tobyinkster.co.uk>
> >
> >
> >
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