[uf-discuss] vote-for

[Siegfried Gipp]

Am Montag, 6. November 2006 22:41 schrieb Ben Ward:

> It's because the microformat does not define the meaning of
> '@rel=vote-for', it just defines the meaning of 'vote-for'. The rel
> (or rev) relationship comes direct from HTML. The pool of values for
> @rel and @rev are shared as they are closely related attributes by
> design (these values are not always appropriate in both directions,
> of course).
>
> So, the value 'vote-for' is definable as 'a positive vote for a
> resource'. That's what vote-for (and vote-against and vote-abstain
> with their respective definitions) *always* means when used in HTML.
> The source and target of that relationship is what the @rel and @rev
> attributes describe, not 'vote-for' itself, and that comes from HTML.

That is exactly what i think. But the specification explicitely relates the 
property "vote-for" to the rev attribute, thus indeed defining the complete 
attribute/property pair of rev="vote-for".

If it would be like you wrote, then rel="vote-for" as well as rev="vote-for" 
would have sensible semantics. Although "vote-against" and "vote-abstain" is 
not that useful together with the rel attribute. In the case of 
rel="vote-against" this would mean, translated to plain english: "please vote 
against me". Syntactically correct, but semantically - erm- at least 
strange :)

A simple meaning of "positive/negative/neutral vote for a resource", if just 
looked at the property itself, would be what i largely prefere. Then this 
property might be combined with any attribute, inheriting the semantics of 
that attribute, and maybe inheriting the semantics of the element as well. So 
combined with the rev attribute, a rev="vote-for" would mean "a positive vote 
for that (target/remote) resource, whereas a rel="vote-for" would then very 
logically mean "a positive vote for this (local/current) resource. And more, 
it would be combineable with the class attribute as well:
<q cite="Galileo Galilei" class="vote-for">and still it's spinning around</q>
Well, forgive my english, i'm no native english speaker. And the cite 
attribute should contain a url. But that's not the point. The point is: Again 
you can apply your "vote-for" semantics to this construct. So this is "a 
positive vote for the content of this container". Might in some cases be 
applicable to the id attribute as well.

It would be wise to restrict the microformats specification to the semantics 
of the _property_ (as you wrote), adding the attribute/property pairs as 
examples and use cases, not more. This would make many microformats much more 
useful.

regards
Siegfried