[whatwg] Microdata feedback

[Ian Hickson]

On Fri, 8 Jul 2011, Philip Jägenstedt wrote:
> On Fri, 08 Jul 2011 00:33:14 +0200, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> > On Wed, 8 Jun 2011, Tomasz Jamroszczak wrote:
> > > 
> > > I've been looking into Microdata specification and it struck me, 
> > > that crawling algorithm is so complex, when it comes to expressing 
> > > simple ideas.  I think that foremost the algorithm should be 
> > > described in the specification with explanation what it's supposed 
> > > to do, before steps of what exactly is to be done are written.
> > 
> > Yeah. Turns out the algorithms involved here are quite badly broken.
> > 
> > It was intended to expose the microdata graph as completely as 
> > possible while dropping anything that would introduce a loop, at the 
> > point where the first repetition would start (so A->B->C=>A would 
> > break at the =), in the API, in the JSON, and in the conformance 
> > rules. I didn't do a good job speccing that, though!
> > 
> > I've fixed the algorithms to make sense (I hope).
> 
> http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/microdata.html#the-properties-of-an-item
> 
> I had a look at this to verify that it is black-box-equivalent to what 
> Opera has implemented, and only discovered one issue:
> 
> <div itemprop=""> should not be added to the .properties collection, 
> because it has no properties. My bad for suggesting that the criteria 
> should be the presence of an itemprop attribute, it should be an 
> itemprop attribute containing at least one token. Can you update the 
> spec to match?

What needs updating? As far as I can tell, what you describe is what the 
spec requires.


> > The RDF algorithm preserves the loops, since doing so is possible with 
> > RDF. Turns out the algorithm almost did this already, looks like it 
> > was an oversight.
> 
> WFM, but note step 3: "Add a mapping from the item item to the subject 
> subject in memory, if there isn't one already." Step 1 guarantees that 
> there is no entry for item, so step 3 can be unconditional.

Good point. Fixed.


> > On Wed, 29 Jun 2011, Philip Jägenstedt wrote:
> > > 
> > > Indeed, multiple types doesn't work at all if you want to mix 
> > > different types. I was assuming that the use case was to extend 
> > > types, kind of like http://schema.org/Person/Governor. However, it 
> > > doesn't work all that well even in that case, since there's no way 
> > > to know which type is the extension of the other and which 
> > > properties exist only on the extended type.
> > 
> > I don't really understand this use case. Can you elaborate on the 
> > problem that needs solving here?
> 
> It's whatever problem <http://schema.org/docs/extension.html> is trying 
> to solve, which is something like "allow people to geek out with more 
> specific vocabularies without interfering with search results".

That doesn't seem to be a problem. I don't really understand what problem 
this is solving.

If the problem is just "I want to annotate data that isn't defined in this 
vocabulary", that's already possible using URL property names.


> If I were schema.org, I would just encourage people to do this:
> 
> <div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
>  <div id="wrapper">
>    <div itemprop="name">Arnold</div>
>    <div itemscope itemtype="http://example.com/Governor" itemref="wrapper">
>      <div itemprop="state">California</div>
>    </div>
>  </div>
> </div>

That's a bit weird. Why not just:?

 <div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
  <div itemprop="name">Arnold</div>
  <div itemprop="http://example.com/Governor/state">California</div>
 </div>

It's hard to know without knowing what concrete user problem we're trying 
to solve here.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'