hreview

hReview 0.3

hReview is a simple, open, distributed format, suitable for embedding reviews (of products, services, businesses, events, etc.) in (X)HTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML. hReview is one of several microformats open standards.

Want to get started with writing an hReview? Use the hReview creator to write a review and publish it.

Microformats Draft Specification 2006-02-22

Editor

Tantek Çelik, Technorati, Inc.

Authors

Tantek Çelik, Technorati, Inc.

Ali Diab,Yahoo! Inc.

Ian McAllister, Microsoft Corporation

John Panzer, America Online, Inc.

Adam Rifkin, CommerceNet Labs

Michael Sippey, Six Apart, Ltd.

Microformats copyright and patents statements apply.

Introduction

Numerous web sites publish reviews using a broad variety of schema for all sorts of things from products (movies, music, books), to businesses (restaurants, hotels, stores), to events (concerts, theatre), to people (artists, leaders, celebrities), to places (landmarks, parks), to online resources (web pages, files), to reviews of reviews themselves.

In order to enable and encourage the sharing, distribution, syndication, and aggregation, of reviews, the authors propose the hReview microformat, an open standard for distributed reviews. The authors have researched both numerous review-examples in the wild and earlier attempts at review-formats, and have designed hReview around a simple minimal schema for reviews. Feedback is encouraged on the hReview feedback page.

Inspiration and Acknowledgments

Thanks to everyone who responded to the open call for implementor participation for hReview. The authors in particular wish to thank the following individuals for their constructive input and feedback: Richard Ault, Danny Ayers, Jeffrey Barr,Adrian Cuthbert,Jason DeFillippo, Brian Del Vecchio, Scott Derringer, Bud Gibson, Joi Ito, Gen Kanai,Niall Kennedy, Rohit Khare, Ryan King, Jonas Luster, Kevin Marks, Mark Nottingham, Derek Powazek, Jeff Rodenburg, David Sifry, James Stewart, Adriaan Tijsseling, Phillip Torrone, Thai Tran, Phillip Winn, YAMAMOTO Yohei.

Scope

Reviews consistently share several common fields. Where possible hReview has been based on this minimal common subset.

Out of scope

Fields that are type-specific have been omitted from hReview. It is important that hReview be kept simple and minimal from the start. Additional features can be added as deemed necessary by practical implementation experience.

The concept of a "universal object identifier", that is, how to identify the same object/item/product across different shopping sites, though something very useful to have, is outside the scope of this format.

Semantic XHTML Design Principles

Note: the Semantic XHTML Design Principles were written primarily within the context of developing hCard and hCalendar, thus it may be easier to understand these principles in the context of the hCard design methodology (i.e. read that first). Tantek

XHTML is built on XML, and thus XHTML based formats can be used not only for convenient display presentation, but also for general purpose data exchange. In many ways, XHTML based formats exemplify the best of both HTML and XML worlds. However, when building XHTML based formats, it helps to have a guiding set of principles.

1. Reuse the schema (names, objects, properties, values, types, hierarchies, constraints) as much as possible from pre-existing, established, well-supported standards by reference. Avoid restating constraints expressed in the source standard. Informative mentions are ok.
   1. For types with multiple components, use nested elements with class names equivalent to the names of the components.
   2. Plural components are made singular, and thus multiple nested elements are used to represent multiple text values that are comma-delimited.
2. Use the most accurately precise semantic XHTML building block for each object etc.
3. Otherwise use a generic structural element (e.g. <span> or <div>), or the appropriate contextual element (e.g. an <li> inside a <ul> or <ol>).
4. Use class names based on names from the original schema, unless the semantic XHTML building block precisely represents that part of the original schema. If names in the source schema are case-insensitive, then use an all lowercase equivalent. Components names implicit in prose (rather than explicit in the defined schema) should also use lowercase equivalents for ease of use. Spaces in component names become dash '-' characters.
5. Finally, if the format of the data according to the original schema is too long and/or not human-friendly, use <abbr> instead of a generic structural element, and place the literal data into the 'title' attribute (where abbr expansions go), and the more brief and human readable equivalent into the element itself. Further informative explanation of this use of <abbr>: Human vs. ISO8601 dates problem solved

Format

In General

The hReview format is based on a set of fields common to numerous review sites and formats in use today on the web. Where possible field names have been chosen based on those defined by the related hCard and hCalendar standards.

Schema

The hReview schema consists of the following:

• hReview (hreview)
  • version. optional. text.
  • summary. optional. text.
  • item type. optional. product | business | event | person | place | website | url.
  • item info. required. fn (url || photo ) | hCard (for person or business) | hCalendar (for event)
  • reviewer. optional. hCard.
  • dtreviewed. optional. ISO8601 absolute date time.
  • rating. optional. fixed point integer [1.0-5.0], with optional alternate worst (default:1.0) and/or best (default:5.0), also fixed point integers, and explicit value.
  • description. optional. text with optional valid XHTML markup.
  • tags. optional. keywords or phrases, using rel-tag, each with optional rating.
  • permalink. optional, using rel-bookmark and rel-self.
  • license. optional, using rel-license.

Field details

The fields of the hReview schema represent the following:

version:: This optional field permits hReview publishers to specify a particular version of hReview that their content uses. By omitting this field, the publisher is stating that implementations may interpret the hReviews according to any version of the hReview specification v0.2 or later. In practice the authors of this specification are comitted to maintaining backward compatibility with content produced using earlier versions of the specification. This field is syntax compatible with, and thus reuses the semantics of "VERSION" as defined in vCard RFC2426 section "3.6.9 VERSION Type Definition". The value of this field for this specification is "0.3".

summary:: This optional field serves as a title for the review itself.

item type:: This optional field "type" provides the type of the item being reviewed, one of the following: product, business, event, person, place, website, url. If omitted, then in some cases the item type may be inferred. If the item is also an hCard, then the item type is a "business" or a "person" based upon which of those the hCard represents. If the item is also an hCalendar event, then the item type is an "event".

item info:: This required field MUST have at a minimum the name ("fn" - the formatted text corresponding to the name) of the item (an hReview describes only one item), SHOULD provide at least one URI ("url") for the item, and MAY provide at least one URL to a photo or depiction ("photo") of the item. For items of type person or business, the item info (fn, url, photo) MUST be encapsulated in an hCard. For items of type event, the item info SHOULD be encapsulated in an hCalendar "vevent". Unique item IDs (e.g. ISBNs, UPCs) MAY be represented as a URN ("url") for the item. Encapsulated microformats (e.g. hCard and hCalendar events for now) may be set on the item itself (e.g. class="item vcard"). However, when using item info subproperties ("fn", "url", "photo"), they MUST be nested inside the item element.

reviewer:: The optional field specifies the person who authored the review. If the reviewer is specified, an hCard representing the reviewer MUST be provided. For anonymous reviews, use "anonymous" (without quotes) for the full name of the reviewer. If no "reviewer" is found inside the hReview, parsers should look outside the hReview, in the context of the page, for the "reviewer". If there is no "reviewer" outside either, then parsers should use the author defined by the containing document language, e.g. for (X)HTML documents, the <address> contact info for the page (which is ideally marked up as an hCard as well), for Atom 1.0 the <entry> <author> if present and if not the <feed> <author>, for RSS the <author> inside the containing <item> element.

dtreviewed:: This optional field when present MUST provide an ISO8601 absolute date time of when the review was written or otherwise authored. This field SHOULD use UTC, but MAY use the time zone offset syntax. If dtreviewed is absent from the hReview, then look outside the hReview, in the surrounding context. If the context is an hAtom entry, use its "published" (or "updated" if that is missing) datetime as the dtreviewed, if not present on the entry, use the "published" (or "updated" if that is missing) of the feed. Otherwise use the creation date (or modified date if that is missing) information according to the containing document language (e.g. "published"/"updated" similarly for Atom feeds), then protocol (e.g. HTTP Last-Modified, or file system last modified datetime) as the dtreviewed.

rating:: The rating is a fixed point integer (one decimal point of precision) from 1.0 to 5.0 inclusive indicating a rating for the item, higher indicating a better rating by default. Optionally a different integral "worst" value and/or "best" value MAY be specified (e.g. 6 from 0-10). The "best" value may be numerically smaller than the "worst" value.

description:: This optional field contains the full text representing the written opinion of the reviewer. The field MAY include valid XHTML markup (e.g. paragraphs). User agents SHOULD preserve any markup. Multiple descriptions or section descriptions (e.g. pros and cons, plusses and minusses) SHOULD be included in the description field.

tags:: Tags are represented using a list of keywords or phrases (using the rel-tag microformat for each individual keyword or phrase tag) that the reviewer associates with the item. The reviewer MAY optionally provide a tag-specific rating inside each rel-tag, e.g. ambience:5. Tag-specific ratings by default use the same range as an overall rating for the item if present, and MAY also have a custom worst...best range specified. Authors MAY also invert this structure for the same semantic if it is more convenient for their markup, that is, place the rel-tag inside a rating to indicate a rated tag. Note: rated tags should ideally use a tag space that explains what the ratings for that tag mean. E.g. Food:18/30 should link to a tags space for Food that explains what an 18 out of 30 means for the Food tag.

permalink:: This optional field is a URL for the hReview. In addition to using the <a href> tag for this field, the attribute rel="self bookmark" MUST be used to indicate that the hyperlink is a permalink for the review itself. If the hyperlink already contains a rel attribute, then the values self and bookmark MUST be included among the space-separated set of values in the attribute. Indexers MAY treat the permalink of a review as a unique ID in order to identify and collate the same review from multiple sources (such as indexing a page multiple times). The permalink MAY also be used to indicate or imply the origin of the review. Authors MAY use the classname of "permalink" on the element representing the permalink, but are not required to do so.

license:: This optional field links to the license under which the contents of the hReview itself is licensed, using the rel-license microformat.

The following field names have been reused from the hCard and hCalendar microformats: version, summary, fn, url, photo, description. In addition, items and reviewers described by hCards MAY contain any hCard field. The rel value "self" has been reused from the Atom 1.0 specification.

More Semantic Equivalents

For some properties there is a more semantic equivalent, and therefore they get special treatment, e.g.:

• For any "url", use <a class="url" href="...">...</a> inside the element with the class name 'hreview' in hReview.
• And for "photo", use <img class="photo" src="..." alt="Photo of ..." />

• Ratings are often presented either as a set of images or characters, e.g. "***". For these, the <abbr> element is particularly useful, as such characters are an abbreviation for the precise rating, e.g. <abbr class="rating" title="3.0">***</abbr>. This is further explored in the next section.

Language

• To explicitly convey the natural language that an hReview is written in, use the standard (X)HTML 'lang' attribute on the element with class="hreview", e.g. <div class="hreview" lang="en"> ... </div> If portions of an hReview (e.g. the item name) are in a different language, use the 'lang' attribute on those portions.
• hReview processors which need to handle the language of reviews MUST process the standard (X)HTML 'lang' attribute as specified.

Human vs. Machine Readable

If an <abbr> element is used for a property, then its 'title' attribute is used for the value of the property, instead of the contents of the element, which can then be used to provide a user-friendly alternate presentation of the value.

Similarly, if an <img /> element is used for one or more properties, it MUST be treated as follows:

1. For the "photo" property and any other property that takes a URL as its value, the src="..." attribute provides the property value.
2. For other properties, the <img /> element's 'alt' attribute is the value of the property.

Object Includes

hReview 0.3 includes support for the object include-pattern.

Often a single page lists an item, and then several reviews for that item. In order to avoid having to repeat the item info for each review of the item, the first review should be marked up as an hReview, with a unique "id" attribute on the item info, and then following reviews should use the object include-pattern to include the item info from the first review.

Notes

This section is informative.

• By marking up a review with the hReview microformat, the expectation is communicated that the review MAY be indexed. This has no impact on the copyright of the review itself which the publisher may explicitly specify using rel-license as specified above.
• The enumerated list of item types is under development and may be extended.
• Each type may have custom hReview fields that follow the common set.
• Additional details about a particular item should be specified with the rest of the item's info at the URL provided for the item.
• Most rating systems use the range 1.0 to 5.0, and most of those represent the rating as a number (and possibly half) of stars. Sites may use whatever graphic they wish to represent the rating.

Examples

Here are a few examples of reviews from current web sites, and how they could be easily enhanced to support the hReview structured review microformat.

Want to get started with writing an hReview? Use the hReview creator to write a review and publish it on your blog.

Restaurant reviews

Here is an example of a simple online restaurant review:

<div>
 <span>5 stars out of 5 stars</span>
 <h4>Crepes on Cole is awesome</h4>
 <span>Reviewer: <span>Tantek</span> - April 18, 2005</span>
 <blockquote><p>
  Crepes on Cole is one of the best little creperies in San Francisco. 
  Excellent food and service. Plenty of tables in a variety of sizes 
  for parties large and small.  Window seating makes for excellent 
  people watching to/from the N-Judah which stops right outside.  
  I've had many fun social gatherings here, as well as gotten 
  plenty of work done thanks to neighborhood WiFi.
 </p></blockquote>
 <p>Visit date: <span>April 2005</span></p>
 <p>Food eaten: <span>Florentine crepe</span></p>
</div>

Adding hReview to this review is quite simple:

<div class="hreview">
 <span><span class="rating">5</span> out of 5 stars</span>
 <h4 class="summary">Crepes on Cole is awesome</h4>
 <span class="reviewer vcard">Reviewer: <span class="fn">Tantek</span> - 
 <abbr class="dtreviewed" title="20050418T2300-0700">April 18, 2005</abbr></span>
 <div class="description item vcard"><p>
  <span class="fn org">Crepes on Cole</span> is one of the best little 
  creperies in <span class="adr"><span class="locality">San Francisco</span></span>.
  Excellent food and service. Plenty of tables in a variety of sizes 
  for parties large and small.  Window seating makes for excellent 
  people watching to/from the N-Judah which stops right outside.  
  I've had many fun social gatherings here, as well as gotten 
  plenty of work done thanks to neighborhood WiFi.
 </p></div>
 <p>Visit date: <span>April 2005</span></p>
 <p>Food eaten: <span>Florentine crepe</span></p>
</div>

Note that some of the properties of this sample review are not captured by hReview (visit date, food eaten). This is deliberate per the scope of keeping hReview minimal and simple.

This sample hReview could be rendered like this:

5 stars out of 5 stars
Crepes on Cole is awesome
Reviewer: Tantek - April 18, 2005

Crepes on Cole is one of the best little creperies in San Francisco. Excellent food and service. Plenty of tables in a variety of sizes for parties large and small. Window seating makes for excellent people watching to/from the N-Judah which stops right outside. I've had many fun social gatherings here, as well as gotten plenty of work done thanks to neighborhood wifi.

Visit date: April 2005
Food eaten: Florentine crepe

Multidimensional Restaurant Review

Some restaurant reviews indicate ratings for different aspects of the restaurant. Such details are represented in hReview using tagged ratings. In addition, note the inline tags inside the description of this review.

Here is one such review in text format:

Cafe Borrone

1010 El Camino Real, Menlo Park, CA 94025, +1-650-327-0830;
cafeborrone.com

Food: 18/30; Ambience: 19/30; Service: 15/30; Price: $$...

This cafe is a welcoming oasis on the Peninsula.  It even has a fountain
outside which cloaks the nearby sounds of El Camino traffic.  Next door to a  
superb indy bookstore, Cafe Borrone is an ideal spot to grab a coffee or a 
snack to accompany a newly purchased book or imported periodical.  Soups and 
sandwich specials rotate daily.  The corn chowder with croutons and big 
chunks of cheese goes especially well with a freshly toasted mini-baguette.  
Evenings are often crowded and may require sharing a table with a perfect 
stranger.  Espresso afficionados will appreciate the Illy coffee.  Noise 
levels can vary from peaceful in the late mornings to nearly overwhelming on 
jazz band nights.

As an hReview:

<div class="hreview">
 <div class="item vcard">
  <div class="fn org summary">Cafe Borrone</div>
  <span class="adr">
   <span class="street-address">1010 El Camino Real</span>,
   <span class="locality">Menlo Park</span>,
   <span class="region">CA</span>
   <span class="postal-code">94025</span>,
  </span>
  <span class="tel">+1-650-327-0830</span>;
  <a class="url" href="http://cafeborrone.com">cafeborrone.com</a>
 </div>
 <ul>
  <li class="rating"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food" rel="tag">
   Food: <span class="value">18</span>/<span class="best">30</span></a>;</li>
  <li class="rating"><a href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/Ambience" rel="tag">
   Ambience: <span class="value">19</span>/<span class="best">30</span></a>;</li>
  <li class="rating"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service" rel="tag">
   Service: <span class="value">15</span>/<span class="best">30</span></a>;</li>
  <li class="rating"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price" rel="tag">
   Price: <abbr class="value" title="2">$$</abbr>...</a></li>
 </ul>
 <div class="description"><p>
  This <abbr class="type" title="business">
  <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cafe" rel="tag">cafe</a></abbr> 
  is a welcoming oasis on the Peninsula.  
  It even has a fountain outside which nearly eliminates 
  the sounds of El Camino traffic.  Next door to a superb indy bookstore, 
  Cafe Borrone is an ideal spot to grab a 
  <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/coffee" rel="tag">coffee</a> 
  or a meal to accompany a newly purchased book or imported periodical.  
  <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/soup" rel="tag">Soups</a> and 
  <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/sandwich" rel="tag">sandwich</a> 
  specials rotate daily.  The corn chowder with croutons and big chunks of cheese 
  goes especially well with a freshly toasted mini-baguette.  Evenings are 
  often crowded and may require sharing a table with a perfect stranger. 
  <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/espresso" rel="tag">Espresso</a> 
  afficionados will appreciate the 
  <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illy" rel="tag">Illy</a> coffee.  
  Noise levels can vary from peaceful in the late mornings to nearly overwhelming on 
  <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/jazz" rel="tag">jazz</a> band nights.
 </p></div>
 Review (<a href="http://microformats.org/wiki/hreview"> 
  hReview v<span class="version">0.3</span></a>)
 by <span class="reviewer vcard"><span class="fn">anonymous</span></span>, 
 <abbr class="dtreviewed" title="20050428T2130-0700">April 28th, 2005</abbr>.
</div>

With an accompanying CSS style sheet like:

a.url { display:block }
ul { margin:1em 0; padding:0 }
ul li { display:inline }

This hReview could be presented similar to the original text:

Cafe Borrone
1010 El Camino Real, Menlo Park, CA 94025, +1-650-327-0830;
cafeborrone.com

Food: 18/30; Ambience: 19/30; Service: 15/30; Price: $$...

This cafe is a welcoming oasis on the Peninsula. It even has a fountain outside which cloaks the nearby sounds of El Camino traffic. Next door to a superb indy bookstore, Cafe Borrone is an ideal spot to grab a coffee or a snack to accompany a newly purchased book or imported periodical. Soups and sandwich specials rotate daily. The corn chowder with croutons and big chunks of cheese goes especially well with a freshly toasted mini-baguette. Evenings are often crowded and may require sharing a table with a perfect stranger. Espresso afficionados will appreciate the Illy coffee. Noise levels can vary from peaceful in the late mornings to nearly overwhelming on jazz band nights.

Review (hReview v0.3) by anonymous, April 28th, 2005.

Product review

Here is an example of a product review:

<div>
 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000089CJI/">
  <img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000089CJI.01._SCTHUMBZZZ_.jpg" 
              alt="Album cover photo: The Postal Service: Give Up." />
 The Postal Service: Give Up</a>
 <blockquote><p>
   "The people thought they were just being rewarded for treating others 
    as they like to be treated, for obeying stop signs and curing diseases, 
    for mailing letters with the address of the sender... Don't wake me, 
    I plan on sleeping in..."
   </p><p>
   "Nothing Better" is a great track on this album, too... 
 </p></blockquote>
 (*****)
</div>

Adding hReview to this review is also quite simple, but in this case requires a few more elements for the rating and reviewer which are required by hReview:

<div class="hreview"><span class="item">
 <a class="url fn" href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000089CJI/">
  <img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000089CJI.01._SCTHUMBZZZ_.jpg" 
       alt="Album cover photo: The Postal Service: Give Up. " 
       class="photo" />
  The Postal Service: Give Up</a></span>
 <div class="description"><p>
    "The people thought they were just being rewarded for treating others 
     as they like to be treated, for obeying stop signs and curing diseases, 
     for mailing letters with the address of the sender... Don't wake me, 
     I plan on sleeping in..."
   </p><p>
   "Nothing Better" is a great track on this album, too... 
 </p></div>
 (<abbr class="rating" title="5">*****</abbr>)
 <p class="reviewer vcard">Review by 
  <a class="url fn" href="http://ifindkarma.com/blog/">Adam Rifkin</a>, 
  <abbr class="dtreviewed" title="200502">February 2005</abbr>
 </p>
</div>

And this hReview might be presented like this:

[Album cover photo: ] [The Postal Service:] [ Give Up ]

The Postal Service: Give Up

"The people thought they were just being rewarded for treating others as they like to be treated, for obeying stop signs and curing diseases, for mailing letters with the address of the sender... Don't wake me, I plan on sleeping in..."

"Nothing Better" is a great track on this album, too...

(*****)

Review by Adam Rifkin, February 2005.

Movie Review

Finally, here is an example of a movie review.

<div>
 <span>anonymous, April 18th, 2005</span>
 <div>
  <a lang="zh" href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0299977/">
  Ying Xiong (<span lang="en">HERO</span>)
  </a>
 </div>
 <div>Rating: 4 out of 5</div>
 <blockquote><p>
  This movie has great visuals and music.
 </p></blockquote>
</div>

With hReview:

<div class="hreview">
 <span class="reviewer vcard">
  <span class="fn">anonymous</span>, 
  <abbr class="dtreviewed" title="20050418">April 18th, 2005</abbr>
 </span>
 <div class="item">
  <a lang="zh" class="url fn" href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0299977/">
  Ying Xiong (<span lang="en">HERO</span>)
  </a>
 </div>
 <div>Rating: <span class="rating">4</span> out of 5</div>
 <div class="description"><p>
  This movie has great music and visuals.
 </p></div>
</div>

Which could be presented like this:

anonymous, April 18th, 2005
Ying Xiong (HERO)
Rating: 4 out of 5

This movie has great music and visuals.

Examples in the wild

This section is informative.

The following sites have published hReviews, and thus are a great place to start for anyone looking for examples "in the wild" to try parsing, indexing, organizing etc. If you publish hReviews on your own page, feel free to add it to the top of this list. Once the list grows too big, we'll make a separate wiki page.

Want to get started with writing an hReview? Use the hReview creator to write a review and publish it on your blog.

• Yahoo Local now supports hReviews for all the user feedback and ratings about places in their search results
• Cork'd is a community site for reviewing and sharing wine. Member-created "Tasting Notes" are published using hReview.
• User:ChrisCasciano has started using hReview in his blog postings including these reviews of Pingerati and Technorati Microformat Search.
• Judy's Book is a local reviews community. All reviews are published in hReview format, and all business listings and members (review authors) in the hCard format.
• Judy's Book is a local reviews community. All reviews are published in hReview format, and all business listings and members (review authors) in the hCard format.
• Yahoo! Tech has launched with hReview markup on all their reviews! Hat tips: Ashish Shetty and Jeremy Zawodny both via Alex Moskalyuk. Alex says: "when we launched, the press reported on 300,000 tech products in our database. Some popular items, like this Apple iPod, have over 200 reviews."
• 3spots: Social + bookMARKING = Smarking has an hReview of Smarking.com (a social bookmarking service) which marks up their tagged links with xFolk.
• Dave Orchard provides hreview marked Vancouver Restaurant reviews
• hReview of Wikio
• Joan has published an hReview of Garçon
• Zipingo Team Blog, a collaborative blog by the Zipingo Product Development Team at Intuit, used the hReview format to tag the backstory of a review on a San Mateo electrician, written by one of the Zipingo team members ZipingoJim. Jim's post also links to his review on Zipingo, a consumer opinion site.
• Minced Media, a media blog by author/writer Kim M. Bayne, used the hReview format to tag her rant about customer service. Future reviews of business and media will contain hReview.
• UK Film Review a new blog using hReview format to review Films and DVD releases in the UK
• DeBaser.it publishes music reviews (in Italian) supporting hReview.
• Peter Westwood posted an hReview of The Fox Inn
• Daniel John provides a scathing hReview of CIBC.
• Yahoo UK Movie Reviews now supports hReview on all (>2000) reviews, e.g. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire Review
• Adam Hertz wrote hReviews of Soluna and Cafe Gibraltar
• Matt McAllister wrote an hReview of the TV show: "The Office"
• Boris Mann wrote an hReview of DoubleTake, a panorama stitch tool for Mac OS X
• Peter Westwood has written an hReview of Blubeckers Hampton Court and an hReview of The Fox Inn Bucks Green, West Sussex
• Dougal has published an hReview of Wolfgang Puck’s Gourmet French Vanilla Latte.
• Dinnerbuzz is a great site for posting tagged reviews of restaurants, and they publish and summarize all their reviews in hReview!
• Bryce Glass posted an hReview of the Uniden ELBT 595 Bluetooth Cordless Phone.
• dda posted an hReview of hReview :)
• An hReview of Caffè Camardo coffee.
• Douglas Clifton posted comments regarding adapting his list of ~800 Developer Resources as a format for evaluating hReview.
• Oliver Brown has announced that his SiteReviews.org (which reviews websites) publishes its reviews using hReview, e.g. here is the review on SiteReviews.org for photomatt.net.
• Phillip Pearson is publishing hReviews in the RSS feed of cafe reviews on his kiwi coffee review site, which of course has the reviews in HTML with embedded hReview markup as well.
• Kjell is publishing his link blog as a list of hReviews.
• Kevin Marks has published two hReviews and used unicode "star" characters for his ratings!
• JamesStewart is publishing hReviews in the location pages at his Grand Rapids WiFi site.
• Soldier Ant has reviewed a cordless phone.
• Paul Livingstone uses hreview to voice his opinion on books, movies and music.
• Andy Clarke uses hReview for his recommended reading list.
• Tim White has begun implementing hReviews at at work.
• Jim Nachlin has added hReview publishing to the CMS he uses to publish his blog.
• Bill Humphries has reviewed the book "A Brother's Price" on his LiveJournal.
• Vitamin uses hReview on it's reviews section (e.g. a review of Fluxiom).
• OpenGuides has support for the hReview microformat in svn, and for now you can see it in action on the Cotswolds OpenGuide.
• Paul Goscicki is publishing his movie ratings using hReview.
• Cell Phones etc. is using hReviews for user-contributed cell phone reviews.
• Adam Liptrot publishes movie reviews using hReview and hCard. See article at Movies and Microformats.

Implementations

This section is informative.

The following implementations have been developed which either generate or parse hReviews. If you have an hReview implementation, feel free to add it to the top of this list. Once the list grows too big, we'll make a separate wiki page.

• Textpattern plug-in : pnh_mf is a plugin for Textpattern that supports embedding hReview and other microformats in templates and blog posts. Written by Chris Casciano.
• Technorati Microformats Search indexes hCard, hCalendar, and hReview as announced by Tantek.
• Flocktails - port of Tails extension for Flock 0.5.12 that looks for hCards, hCalendar, xFolk and hReview and tosses them into a handy topbar
• Revieworld CTO Ben Griffiths has announced that they have built support into Reevoo to aggregate reviews of products that are published on blogs using hReview (open source parser for Ruby)
• Leo Cerebellum Annotare notes that ReviewZilla Alpha 2 includes MicroFormat hReview markup
• Calvin Yu has written a web service that will allow you plot and describe places on a Yahoo Map easily using hReview and geo.
• Tails is a Firefox Extension that will display the presence of microformats (hCard, hCalendar, hReview, xFolk) on a webpage.
• Kritx is a site that indexes hReviews and other reviews on the Web.
• Goodpic has written:
  • hReview creator for Amazon.com products
  • hReview creator for Amazon.co.uk products
  • hReview creator for Amazon.co.jp products
  • be sure to choose the "hRview" tab from among the choices on the page that says "You can choose from more than 30 designs, please click the tab to select categories."
• See the microformats.org hReview creator (feedback)
• Eigaseikatu, one of the largest movie community sites in Japan, provides hReview creator for movie review.
• hReview plugin for WordPress
• Another hReview plugin for WordPress. Works with the standard page/post editor so you can have multiple reviews in a single page/post.
• WP Movie Ratings is a WordPress plugin made by Paul Goscicki which lets you rate (and review) movies and publish those ratings as hReviews.
• Ryan King has an hReview Creator (feedback).
• Rvu is a Ning app that lets you write reviews of reviews and publishes them in hReview
• Microformat Base is an open-source PHP microformat aggregation crawler, currently recognizing hreview, hcalendar, and hcard.

References

Normative References

• XHTML 1.0 SE
• XMDP
• hCard
• hCalendar
• rel-tag
• RFC2119
• RFC3986
• RFC4287 (Atom 1.0)

Informative References

• CSS1
• ISO.8601.1988
  • International Organization for Standardization, "Data elements and interchange formats - Information interchange - Representation of dates and times", ISO Standard 8601, June 1988.
• W3C NOTE-datetime-19980827
• RFC3667
• RFC3668
• W3C Patent Policy
• Crepes on Cole reviews on Yahoo! Local
• Other reviews efforts. See reviews-formats.
• Contributed from http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/hReview.

Similar Work

• hListing
• XOXO

Copyright

This specification is (C) 2005 by the authors. However, the authors intend to submit (or already have submitted, see details in the spec) this specification to a standards body with a liberal copyright/licensing policy such as the GMPG, IETF, and/or W3C. Anyone wishing to contribute should read their copyright principles, policies and licenses (e.g. the GMPG Principles) and agree to them, including licensing of all contributions under all required licenses (e.g. CC-by 1.0 and later), before contributing.

Patents

This specification is subject to a royalty free patent policy, e.g. per the W3C Patent Policy, and IETF RFC3667 & RFC3668.

Work in progress

This specification is a work in progress. As additional aspects are discussed, understood, and written, they will be added.

Changes from v0.2

The following changes have been made in hReview v0.3 over hReview v0.2:

Normative changes:

1. MUST (instead of SHOULD) use hCard for the item description of a business or person
2. "reviewer" changes
   1. Made reviewer *optional* per feedback from Ryan King and Mark Nottingham
   2. If reviewer is absent from the hReview, then look outside the hReview, in the context of the page, for the reviewer. If there is no "reviewer" outside either, then use the author information according to the containing document language (e.g. <address> for (X)HTML pages) as the reviewer.
   3. MUST (instead of SHOULD) use hCard to represent reviewer information
3. "dtreviewed" changes
   1. Made dtreviewed *optional* per feedback from Ryan King and Mark Nottingham
   2. If dtreviewed is absent from the hReview, then look outside the hReview, in the surrounding context. If the context is an hAtom entry, use its "published" (or "updated" if that is missing) datetime as the dtreviewed, if not present on the entry, use the "published" (or "updated" if that is missing) of the feed. Otherwise use the information according to the containing document language (e.g. "published"/"updated" similarly for Atom feeds), then protocol (e.g. HTTP Last-Modified, or file system last modified datetime).
4. SHOULD use hCalendar to represent an item of 'type' 'event'
5. Added one decimal digit of precision to ratings' numerical values based on publisher experience.
6. Use the "value" construct from hCard (as it is used in "tel" properties for example) to more explicitly markup the rating value when also providing (marking up) the best/worst of a rating.
7. Added rel-license to indicate the license of the hReview as a whole.
8. Permit tags inside ratings to denote rated tags, the same as ratings inside tags per suggestion from Eran Globen.
9. Add include-pattern support to allow multiple reviews for the same item to not repeat the item info.

Informative changes (several, but in particular):

1. Note that scalar/rated tags would ideally use a tag space that explain the ratings for that tag. E.g. to explain what Food:18/30 means.
2. Updated examples accordingly.

Related Pages

• hReview creator (feedback) - create your own hReview.
• hReview authoring - learn how to add hReview markup to your existing contact info.
• hReview FAQ - If you have any questions about hReview, check here, and if you don't find answers, add your questions!
• hReview feedback - Feedback is encouraged!
• hReview parsing - Normatively details of how to parse hReviews.
• hReview issues - Please add any issues with the specification to the issues page.
• hReview profile - The XMDP profile for hReview
• hReview tests - a wiki page with actual embedded hReviews to try parsing.
• hReview brainstorming - thoughts for improving hReview
• review-examples
• review-formats
• review-brainstorming - where we brainstormed about review formats before coming up with hReview.

Further Reading

• See also blogs discussing this page.

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