microformats2-brainstorming

Brainstorming experimental / undeveloped / rejected ideas for microformats-2.

further simplifications

more on allow root class name only

This has been stable for a while, see:

• microformats-2-implied-properties

adopt itemref

There many existing real-world use-cases where either:

• several microformats in a page want to share some common data without repeating it.
  • e.g. a page about a product with multiple reviews of that product (very common, products sites, Amazon/CNET et al, review aggregators, Yelp et al)
  • e.g. representing the author of multiple hAtom entries on a page. Currently this is possible with the <address class="hcard"> optimisation, which would be rendered obsolete by the proposed new generic parsing rules.
• a microformat in a page needs to incorporate information spread across different parts of a page, without assigning the entire page to that microformat

The include-pattern provides the necessary functionality for existing microformats (1.0).

For 2.0 it may be reasonable to simply re-use the nice itemref attribute from microdata, with identical/analogous functionality.

That is, when present on the root element of a microformat, the itemref attribute provides a space separated list of ids of elements in the document which are then incorporated as children of the microformat, before its actual children in the document. This is a simple coarse summary of course, and the actual itemref inclusion algorithm should be followed.

One might say that this raises the issue of requiring HTML5 with the ability to accepted extended attributes like "itemref", but I think that might be ok for the set of use-cases that need "itemref". That is, they *are* a minority of actual use-cases, and thus making them use HTML5 is probably ok.

• More problematic is the fact that itemref is not part of the HTML5 specification, nor is it documented as a stable draft. In the past, we resisted cribbing attributes from RDFa, which was a stable augmentation of HTML, and creating an ugly empty-element hack rather than reusing content</content>. We build atop HTML, and it would be dangerous to adopt features of separate technologies that are unstable, may change, or may disappear. --BenWard 06:46, 5 October 2011 (UTC)

rejected ideas

n prefix for multiple numbers

Idea:

• "n-*" for (one or more) numbers, e.g. "n-rating", "n-geo", leaving the semantics of more than one number up to specific format. e.g. for an "n-rating" inside an "h-review", the first number would presumably be the rating value, when only two numbers the second would be the "best" value (e.g. rated <span class="n-rating">3 out of 4</span>), when three numbers the second would be the "worst" and the third would be the "best" (e.g. <span class="n-rating">7.5 out of 1 to 10</span>). similarly "n-geo" would specify the first number to be the latitude and the second to be the longitude.

Rejected because while this *might* work for some properties in *English* it will NOT localize/internationalize well (orders of numbers in phrases change in different languages), and it will also limit the human expressivity of the plain text. Thanks to Ben Ward for this feedback at the 2011-06-02 microformats dinner. Tantek 14:25, 9 June 2011 (UTC)

see also

• microformats-2
• microformats-2-brainstorming
• microformats-2-prefixes
• microformats-2-implied-properties
• microformats-2-faq