[uf-discuss] hReview feedback

[Mark Nottingham]

(I had to restrain myself from Subject: hReview Review)

In general, I like hReview a lot, and it fits the use case I'm  
working on nicely.

However, it's currently too restrictive in a couple of places; in  
particular, it requires the reviewer and the date reviewed to be  
explicitly included in the content. While I understand that this  
information is useful -- or even required -- for some uses of  
hReview, it may not be for others.

For example, a review's author might be inferred from the Web site  
it's hosted on. The date of the review could be inferred from the  
HTTP Last-Modified header, it could be unknown, or it could be  
irrelevant (e.g., a review of a recipe).

In general, I don't think that formats that are to be used on the  
open Web should have lots of mandatory fields; it raises the bar for  
authoring them (as well as repurposing existing data to them), and  
ends up restricting how people use them, because of the unforeseen  
consequences of doing so. I think this is the biggest mistake we made  
in Atom; rather than making it an open format, we required a bunch of  
elements that really weren't always required.

Anyway, keep up the good work, and please make these fields optional.

Cheers,

--
Mark Nottingham     http://www.mnot.net/