[whatwg] microformats, microdata, and custom data attributes

[Justin Karneges]

On Monday 18 April 2011 12:48:27 Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> First, I recommend working with the Microformats community to define
> the data language.  If this is meant to be a standard, they're the
> go-to people to work with in getting this sort of thing stable and
> complete.  This is roughly similar to hAtom, which is for marking up
> blogs and similar, but it has a further element of "replying" or
> "mentioning" which is somehow tied up in identity management.  There's
> some difficult issues hiding in here that probably need a bunch of
> eyes to find bugs.
> 
> Microformats are traditionally defined using HTML4 rel/class-based
> techniques, but they're trivial to translate into a more explicit
> Microdata-based vocabulary as well.

Given that it is meant primarily as a data exchange protocol, explicit is 
better, so I'm preferring Microdata instead of Microformats here.  Also, it 
seems Google already has a registry of formats, and one is "Person" which may 
be reusable.

Now we have this:

<p>
  <span itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Person" 
itemid="acct:justin at example.org">
    <meta itemprop="context" content="reply"/>
    <a itemprop="url" href="http://example.org/justin/"><span 
itemprop="name">justin</span></a>
  </span> I totally agree.
</p>

We are still debating whether it makes sense to add "context" in here, but 
that discussion is not necessary for this mailing list.

Thanks for your help in pointing me in the right direction.

Justin