product-brainstorming

Brainstorming for hProduct Microformat

This is a brainstorm for the hProduct microformat. See also examples of hProduct.

Contributors

• Aaron Gustafson, Easy! Designs
• Craig Cook, Focal Curve

The Problem

There are numerous ways to publish product information on the web, but nothing is stanardized. It would be useful to have standardized product information on the web for creating mash-up applications which could

• allow aggregated product details to be linked to from hListings or hReviews
• match hListings to hReviews
• aggregate product-specific information from across the web
• aggregate and compare like products based on features

Elements that come up often in practice

Examples of elements that might be included because they seem to come up often in user- and CMS-generated product publishing, include the following:

Base Elements

• name (or fn)
• image (could be sub-categorized)
  • thumb (for thumbnail)
  • full (for full size image)
  • photo (for a photograph)
  • illo (for an illustration).
• description (could be sub-categorized)
  • summary
  • extended
• brand
• uri (or url) - URI for the product at its brand website; not to be confused with the hListing 'permalink'.
• msrp

Extensibility

Being that so many products in the world have specific charachteristics or properties, we thought it might be wise to create a means of standardizing the listing of that information, setting the stage for possible subformats of hProduct. This could be done by setting up property value pairs or groups using a CLASS of "p-v". It would be possible to offer a few means of doing this.

Natural language property-value association

<p class="p-v">The <span class="property">dimensions</span> of this book are 
  <span class="value">6x10</span></p>