[whatwg] Annotating structured data that HTML has no semantics for

[Frank Hellenkamp]

Ian Hickson wrote:
> I agree entirely. I actually tried to find a workable solution to address 
> this but unfortunately the only general solutions I could come up with 
> that would allow this were selector-based, and in practice authors are 
> still having trouble understanding how to use Selectors even with CSS. 
> There's also the problem with separating the data from the rules that say 
> how to interpret the data, which would likely lead to more problems than 
> the typos one would get from repeating the itemprop=""s.

I am sorry, but I cannot agree on this one.

At least simple selectors are well understood and a well established
technique on the web.

There is widespread use for it in CSS (so it is very simple to test, if
your selector works for the correct set of elements).

And the fact that jquery is *so* successful is based on jquery's
capability to work with selectors in such an easy way – not the other
way around.

And with a selector-based aproach it is far easier to add
metadata-information to existing content, than with the
metadata-proposal. So for authors it would be much easier, I think.

It would work like a dezentralized microformats-approach (btw. it would
be easy to map the existing microformats to such a css-based
metadata-format), with the benefit that you can simply map your own
classes and ids to global ones like foaf, dc or hcard.

And you could easily use such profiles from other pages, e.g.:
Someone could markup the songs on his page in a way last.fm does and
then simply use a copy of their meta-data profile (basically in the same
way we use microformats now).


The only real problem I see is the unfortunate fact, that it is harder
for browser-implementors to write a good copy & paste code which
preserves all metadata from one source to another.


Best regards

Frank

-- 
frank hellenkamp | interface designer
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jonas at depagecms.net

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