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

[jgraham at opera.com]

Quoting Philip Taylor <excors+whatwg at gmail.com>:

> On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 11:32 AM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
>>
>> One of the more elaborate use cases I collected from the e-mails sent in
>> over the past few months was the following:
>>
>>   USE CASE: Annotate structured data that HTML has no semantics for, and
>>   which nobody has annotated before, and may never again, for private use or
>>   use in a small self-contained community.
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> To address this use case and its scenarios, I've added to HTML5 a simple
>> syntax (three new attributes) based on RDFa.
>
> There's a quickly-hacked-together demo at
> http://philip.html5.org/demos/microdata/demo.html (works in at least
> Firefox and Opera), which attempts to show you the JSON serialisation
> of the embedded data, which might help in examining the proposal.

I have a *totally unfinished* demo that does something rather similar
at [1]. It is highly likely to break and/or give incorrect results**.
If you use it for anything important you are insane :)

My general impression from writing the tool is that this proposal is,
at least, easy to write consumers for. I get the feeling that the
production side will also be within the grasp of most authors,
although it is hard to say for sure since I haven't really tried
authoring anything.

[1] http://james.html5.org/microdata/

** Known bugs include: incorrect lowercasing of non ascii characters,
lack of support for resolving uris, lack of rdf output, some others
that I forget