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

[Jonas Sicking]

In short, this proposal looks very interesting to me. There are
several things that attract me to it:

* Looks very simple to author
  This is absolutely critical to any web technology and IMHO where RDFa fails.
* Generic syntax which allows creations of generic parsers
  This will allow us to create APIs that expose microdata in a parsed
form to extensions which should significantly improve the amount of
microdata support we can supply in Firefox.
  This will hopefully also allow integration of microdata with things
like the DOM and (CSS) Selectors.
* Separation of microdata from transitionally author "owned"
locations, such as the class attribute.
  This means we'll have to worry much less about accidental collisions
with author values.

Some of the improvement suggestions that I have heard that sounds
interesting, though possibly for the next version of microdata.

* Support for specifying a machine-readable value, such as for dates,
colors, numbers, etc.
* Support for tabular data.

Especially the former is very interesting to me. I even wonder it
would allow replacing the <time> element with a standardized
microformat, such as:

Christmas is going down on <span item="w3c.time"
itemvalue="12-25-2009">The 25th day of December<span>!

(Though I'd probably avoid prefixes for 'standardized' item names).

/ Jonas