[whatwg] Microdata status

[Michael[tm] Smith]

+Ojan, +Alex

Jirka Kosek <jirka at kosek.cz>, 2013-05-14 17:22 +0200:

> Hi,
> 
> are there any plans to change Microdata API? From the following
> conversation between Chromium developers it's not clear to me whether
> they consider API itself bad or only their implementation.
> 
> https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!topic/blink-dev/b54nW_mGSVU
> 
> Any insight welcomed.

Not claiming to speak for anybody on the Chrome/Blink team but as far as
that conversation among the Chromium developers, looking at it from the
outside at least, my read is that they consider the current API spec to be
bad -- not just their implementation.

That said, it doesn't seem like anybody in the discussion other than Ojan
mentioned anything bad in particular about the API spec. Ojan's comment:

  "I have one concern with the feature as specced is that getItems and the
  various Collection returning properties/methods all return live
  NodeLists/Collections. [...] Live NodeLists/Collections impose a large
  cost on the rest of the codebase and fundamentally make regular DOM
  operations slower.

Then there's a general comment from Alex:

  "The current micro data API is...poor. I think we should write it off and
  try again. No opinions in what that means for our impl in the meantime,
  though (other than it shouldn't ship, of course). I'm happy to put work
  into a better API if someone will collaborate on impl."

So anyway, it looks like the gist from the overall discussion is: They've
completely removed the Microdata API implementation from Blink, and unless
Alex or somebody else writes up an alternative API proposal they can be
happier with, it seems unlikely they're going to be re-implementing
anything based on the current Microdata API spec.

  --Mike

-- 
Michael[tm] Smith http://people.w3.org/mike