[whatwg] Extensible microdata attributes

[Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis]

On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 11:48 AM, Brett Zamir <brettz9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>  On 4/26/2011 5:33 PM, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 7:36 AM, Brett Zamir<brettz9 at yahoo.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>> 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>
>>
>> I'm confused by your examples. What extractable statement are you trying
>> to
>> markup with microdata here? Is it: "the United Nations is in New York"?
>
> That was one part, but I was mostly focusing on the quotation indicating
> that it was by the United Nations (which is an organization in New York). It
> is using a special attribute (in this case "item-who") rather than defining
> a (hidden) property-value child element (with itemprop="who").

So the extractable data is: "the United Nations is the source of the
quotation '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...'"?

Microdata (like microformats) is supposed to encourage visible data rather
than hidden metadata. Both your markup examples seem to express
authorship of the quotation through hidden metadata. A visible data approach
might look something like:

  <blockquote
    cite="http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/preamble.shtml"
    itemscope
    itemtype="http://tei-vocabulary.example.com/cit"
    itemprop="quote">
      We the Peoples of the
      <span itemprop="bibl">
        <span itemprop="author"
              itemtype="http://tei-vocabulary.example.com/orgName">
          United Nations
        </span>
      </span> determined to save succeeding
      generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has
      brought untold sorrow to mankind...
  </blockquote>

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis