[whatwg] Extensible microdata attributes

[Brett Zamir]

  Hi,

I'm interested to see more rich semantics (such as made possible in Text 
Encoding Initiative documents to become available in HTML (e.g., toward 
making markup more conveniently and richly queryable on sites like 
Wikisource)), but this concern relates to data-centric markup as well.

Without stepping into a microformats/RDF-a debate (especially since it 
appears microdata is the one that is being successfully formalized), I 
would like to recommend that extensible data-*-like attributes become 
available to be associated with microdata items, but which do not 
impinge on the intended private nature of those data-* attributes. 
Perhaps "item-*" could be reserved for this purpose?

This would prevent the need for such ugly hacks as:

<span id="UnitedNations" style="display:none;" itemprop="orgName" 
item-placeName="New York">United Nations</span>
...
<blockquote itemscope="itemscope" itemtype="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0">
<span itemprop="who" style="display:none;">#United_Nations</span>
     We the Peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding 
generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has 
brought untold sorrow to mankind...
</blockquote>

For the latter portion, one could instead just do:

<blockquote itemscope="itemscope" itemtype="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" 
item-who="#United_Nations">
     We the Peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding 
generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has 
brought untold sorrow to mankind...
</blockquote>

Incidentally, as for the existing property names, I'd think changing the 
item properties to "scope", "itype", and "prop" would make for much 
cleaner, more appealing and readable code.

Thanks,
Brett