[whatwg] adding microdata to basic links

[Tantek Çelik]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 10:22, Stéphane Corlosquet
<scorlosquet at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 1:18 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 10:02 AM, Stéphane Corlosquet
>> <scorlosquet at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Starting from a basic markup like this:
>> > [[[
>> > This book has been authored by <a href="http://smith.org/john">John
>> > Smith</a>.
>> > ]]]
>> >
>> > I would like to markup both the textContent of the link ("John Smith")
>> and
>> > the url from the href attribute.
>> >
>> > In RDFa this is done by adding a couple of attributes to the a element.
>> It
>> > would read like this:
>> > [[[
>> > This book has been authored by <a property="name" rel="url" href="
>> > http://smith.org/john">John Smith</a>.
>> > ]]]

Stéphane, this looks like an incomplete example - how does a parser
know where the object that has name and url property starts and ends,
is it the whole page? The nearest common ancestor element? AKA how
does a parser determine the scope of the object?

And are "name" and "url" intended to be page-specific properties, or
do they belong to a theoretical shared vocabulary?

Could you provide a complete RDFa example of what you're attempting to
accomplish?


>> > Is there any way to do the same in microdata without adding a new HTML
>> > element to the markup?
>>
>> No, Microdata purposely keeps its data model simple by expressing
>> property names through a single attribute.

One person (parser developer's) simple, is another person's (web
author/designer/publisher) odd new strange way, and thus far from
"simple". It's a trade-off rather than being "simple" in any absolute
terms.


>>  Since having @itemprop on
>> an <a> always refers to the @href of the element, you must nest an
>> additional element, such as a <span>, into your markup to carry the
>> property that refers to the text content.

This does seem to be a (fairly common) case where microdata requires
additional markup (another element) whereas both microformats (e.g.
hCard) and microdata (through the perhaps questionable overloading of
'rel') do not.

Stéphane, if you could provide a "complete" RDFa example of the
content example you gave, I'd like to see what Tab (or anyone else)
sees as an "ideal" way to mark it up with microdata instead for
comparison purposes.

Thanks,

Tantek

-- 
http://tantek.com/ - I made an HTML5 tutorial! http://tantek.com/html5