[whatwg] microdata: itemprop in <col> tag

[Ian Hickson]

On Sun, 16 Oct 2011, David Karger wrote:
>
> One natural way to represent a collection of structured items is in an 
> html table.  this can coexist with microdata, by using <tr itemscope> 
> and <td itemprop> tags.  But by ignoring the structure of the table, 
> this creates a lot of redundant attribute specification.
> 
> It would yield cleaner markup if it were possible to use <col 
> itemprop="foo"> to indicate an item property that should be inherited by 
> all cells in the given column.  In other words, to assert that any <td> 
> associated with a <col> should inherit the itemprop associated with that 
> <col> .
> 
> It would yield even cleaner markup if there were a way to indicate that 
> every <tr> was a distinct itemscope (the common case).  For example, to 
> use <table itemtype="bar"> to indicate that each row of the table scopes 
> an item of type bar.  Or perhaps <table itemscope> could be interpreted 
> as asserting a distinct itemscope for each row without specifying a 
> type.
> 
> But even using just the <col> inheritance rule, while still placing 
> itemscope in <tr> tags, would save a quadratic quantity of markup.

Yeah, microdata doesn't handle tables well.

I'm a little reluctant to add magic to handle tables, because it can make 
it quite hard to work out what's going on, and it's not clear how common 
the problem really is. If it turns out to be a common issue, then it's 
something we should definitely consider, though.


On Sun, 16 Oct 2011, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> 
> Just put an @itemref on each <col>, pointing to the <td>s that are part 
> of that column.  It's more verbose, but it doesn't rely on special 
> HTML-only rules.

That's a possible workaround for now, true.

-- 
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