[whatwg] microformats, microdata, and custom data attributes

[Justin Karneges]

Hi Tab,

On Friday 15 April 2011 22:12:24 Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 6:29 PM, Justin Karneges <justin at affinix.com> wrote:
> > Hi folks,
> > 
> > I'm desiring a way to markup "mentions of a person" semantically within
> > HTML, for use in an open standard.  Think of a more rich form of the
> > @person convention used on Twitter and elsewhere:
> > 
> > <p>@justin I totally agree</p>
> > 
> > My first thought was to use a data-* attribute.  For example:
> > 
> > <p><a href="http://example.org/justin/" data-mention-
> > id="acct:justin at example.org" data-mention-context="reply">justin</a> I
> > totally agree.</p>
> > 
> > However, the HTML specification says custom data attributes are only to
> > be used privately.  So, I am not sure if it is appropriate to create a
> > public standard whereby independent developers are encouraged to utilize
> > a common data-* attribute.
> > 
> > Another way is to use Microdata, though I seem to have to hack it a bit
> > to have hidden values:
> > 
> > <p><a href="http://example.org/justin/" itemscope
> > itemtype="http://example.org/itemtypes/mention"
> > itemid="acct:justin at example.org"><span itemprop="context:reply"/><span
> > itemprop="name">justin</span></a> I totally agree.</p>
> 
> If necessary, representing hidden data can be done via <meta itemprop
> content> in Microdata.
> 
> It might be useful to understand a little more about your goal in
> marking this up, though, so the most appropriate way to do so can be
> determined.  Is this meant to be processed by machines?  If so, what
> use will it be put to?

Yes, this is meant to be processed by machines, as part of a data exchange 
protocol.  It is not browser-specific.  For example, this kind of HTML 
formatting may find its way into an Atom feed, or even an XMPP message.  It is 
not expected that this format would be shoved directly to a browser for render 
(although, if someone does that, ideally it should degrade gracefully, hence 
the use of <a> around the name).

Here are two things I'd expect apps to do:

  1) Render the mentions in a special way.  For example, our application shows 
the mentioned name inside of a colored, button-looking box with an icon image 
based on the domain of the person being mentioned.  This kind of presentation-
level detail would not be encoded in the HTML itself.

  2) Keep display names up to date.  In the event that a user changes his/her 
name, but the account id is not changed, future replays or retransmissions of 
this HTML may contain different name text (the 'justin' part in my example).  
For example, an aggregator may track name changes, and update its cached HTML 
accordingly rather than holding onto stale names.

Regarding #2, it may also be useful for servers that persist this data to do 
so without saving any name text at all (imagine the 'a' element in the earlier 
example having no cdata).  Whenever the HTML blob is extracted from the db, it 
would need to be stamped with the name of the mentioned user before sending 
out to a client.

So I take it that using data-* for this is not recommended?

Justin