hreview-feedback

hReview Feedback

This document is for keeping track of feedback about hReview, one of several MicroFormats.

Feedback

General Questions

See the hReview FAQ.

General Comments

April 30, 2005:

Nice work :-) Some questions:

For the most part, the concept of the format's "fields" translates, in any particular case, to the field name appearing in the class attribute of an element, and the field value appearing in the text of the element. Right?

Can it be generally stated that it doesn't matter which elements these class/fields are attached to? If not, what are the specific constraints?

It'd be useful to outline any cases where:

• fields or values appear in other attributes (e.g., class="type" title="business")

• an element indicated as a field can contain more than text, or a mix of text and other elements (e.g., some of the 1 of 5 type rating span examples)

Also, what is the constraint about class attributes containing multiple values where one is a field name (i.e., I assume you're not supposed to put two field names in the same class--but, what is the extent of the constraint? Can multiple class values be used as long as they don't look like two field names?)

See hcard-parsing which answers these questions. -Tantek

Also (rel-tag question), does rel-tag support this kind of eleaborate label (where the tag indicated element has more than just a text value that exactly matches the last part of the uri?):

<li><a href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/Price" rel="tag">
Price: <abbr class="rating" title="2">$$</abbr>...</a></li>

Doesn't RelTag significantly constrain what appears enclosed within the A element? i.e., (from Technorati's tag description:)

 <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/[tagname]" rel="tag">[tagname]</a>

-Jay Fienberg

</nowiki>

See the rel-tag spec. The last segment of the URL is the tagname, not the contents of the element. The Technorati help page is only providing suggested markup. See the spec for normative details. -Tantek

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I don't know how widespread it is to have summaries of a review in one place and then point to them in another, but that's something I do on one of my sites, where reviews are accepted by trackback (eg. | this page). I've blogged a possible markup for that | here

- JamesStewart

Thus the "description" is optional, and you can provide a URL permalink back to the original. -Tantek

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I've added some items to the FAQ page (hReview FAQ) Please take a look at them and feel free to clarify or modify.

-RyanKing

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I've been following the evolution of microformats on Technorati with great interest and hReview seems to really break new ground. Reviews represent something big enough that they have their own identity, they can be 'referenced'. In contrast hCard and hCalendar seem to be more of a 'pass-by-value' proposition (I've ammended my SmartTag + AutoLink = SmartLink experiment to support hCalendar). To that end I was surprised at the specification. I've explained things more fully here

-Adrian Cuthbert

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Has anyone considered list context? I have adapted my Developer's Resource Index, which is in essence a list of reviews, to use the hReview spec. However, is it appropriate to set the entire list as &lt:dl class="hreview">, or each individual item by wrapping the <dt>/<dd> pairs in a <div> (which is the approach I took)?

Follow-up: scratch that last comment: Since I'm using XHTML 1.1,

is not allowed in this context. Which of course brings me back to the original question. Hmm...

Have a look at an example of the code if you'd like: Markup Languages. I will post this URI to del.icio.us tagged as hreview as well.

Douglas Clifton

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Shouldn't it be mentioned somewhere in which language the review is written in? Is it just a slip of the mind, or a very US-centric attitude, dude? I don’t think adding language info would be out of scope, as it would help filter out unwanted languages from search queries; plus, Ce n’est pas parce que mon blog est en anglais, 꼭 英語만 쓰는 것이 아니다… What if I wanted to post the same review in different languages, or quote something in another language..?

dda

Thanks for your input. This was made explicit and resolved by hReview 0.2, specifically: hReviews and language -Tantek

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A sample xhtml fragment of "Multidimensional Restaurant Review" is not valid XML format.

original:

 This 
 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cafe" rel="tag">cafe</a> 

correct:

 This 
 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cafe" rel="tag">cafe</a> 

YAMAMOTO Yohei

Thanks for the feedback Yamamoto, that was my typo and the example has been corrected. - Tantek

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Should the 'type' field be expanded? What is the proper type for reviewing a movie seen in a cinema? Of the existing values, 'event' would seem to apply best, but it's not completely intuitively obvious, especially since 'product' could also apply.

Compare to reviewing a movie on DVD. One might be tempted to use the 'product' type. But what is really the product here -- the film being viewed, or its packaging? Again, 'product' doesn't seem intuitively obvious, as it would seem to apply to more utilitarian objects, rather than to ephemera like movies or music.

I suggest the following:

'event' should specifically be defined to mean an occurence in a particular time/location frame, experienced in person (live concerts, trade shows, sporting events, etc).

'product' should similarly be narrowed down in some fashion. In some cases, it might be difficult to decide whether one is reviewing a 'business', or their 'product'. And where does the concept of a 'service' fall? These ideas are sometimes closely related, and other times quite separate.

'media' should be added to cover reviews of artistic creations (music, films, literature, art) which may appear in non-unique formats (viewed in person, DVD, CD, TV, radio, magazines, art galleries, etc).

Dougal Campbell 10:28, 26 Jul 2005 (PDT)

Dougal, this was already answered in the FAQ a while ago as the first question! -Tantek

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The rating field, at the moment, is mandated to be an integer. Is there a particular reason for this (which seems like an unnecessary restriction)?

- Alf Eaton.

First, the rating field is based on current actual review/rating data published on the web, which for the most part is integer. There have been several requests for allowing one decimal digit of precision, since that broader definition would include many more (90%+ at least) reviews on the web, it is being considered for hReview 0.3.

Second, "unnecessary restriction" is looking at it from the complete wrong perspective. "unnecessary axis of freedom or extensibility" is the thing to avoid, because that is the antithesis of simplicity, and causes more work for everyone involved, testing, developing etc. Premature generality is a common mistake made by engineers, and microformats explicitly seeks to avoid it.

- Tantek

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Consider for hReview 0.3: make it explicit that a review of an event (see item types list) SHOULD use hCalendar to represent the item, just as a review of a company or person SHOULD use hCard. - Tantek

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I'd like the rating field to contain the scale of the rating. Without the scale the aggregation of said rating is kind of pointless. Right? Kal Ström

Kal, it already does. Please read the rating field description. The default scale is 1 (worst) to 5 (best) and either can be changed by the author. See the multidimensional restaurant review for an example of this. - Tantek

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