[uf-new] Issue HP6 - P-V seems like a catch-all for hProduct

[Manu Sporny]

Paul Lee (이기수) wrote:
> IIUC, part of the reason why hproduct has been under discussion for
> quite awhile is b/c of the debate between p-v vs. more defined
> attributes.  p-v is quite helpful b/c the attributes users care about
> change over time.  Take cameras, for instance.  Did anyone care about
> megapixels 10 years ago? etc.

Don't try to future-proof your vocabulary - if there isn't enough data
to back up a vocabulary term, it doesn't belong in a Microformat.

One of the principles that this whole community is built around is
proving that vocabulary term usage in-the-wild has reached a critical
mass and thus needs to be standardized.

The nice thing about vocabulary development is that it is a continuous
process... if you miss an important vocabulary term now, you can always
put it in later. It's much more costly to remove vocabulary terms from a
vocabulary if they are not used.

For example, if "printable" becomes a reality for a large range of
plastic products (due to the proliferation of high-quality, low-cost 3D
printers), then the term can be added to the product vocabulary when
that happens. Not before.

I understand your argument for p-v, however, if every Microformat used
it we would start to have a high number of collisions when interleaving
Microformats on a page.

There are two arguments against using p-v:

1. It is an attempt to future-proof a vocabulary that isn't based on any
hard data.

2. It increases the likely-hood of vocabulary term collisions.

To put it another way - if we are going to allow 'p-v', hAudio will have
support for it immediately... and then people will have a nasty time
interleaving hAudio+hProduct. If you'd like an example of this issue,
I'd be happy to give one.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Scaling Past 100,000 Concurrent Web Service Requests
http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2008/09/30/scaling-webservices-part-1