[whatwg] Microdata status

[Ojan Vafai]

On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 9:39 PM, Michael[tm] Smith <mike at w3.org> wrote:

> +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.
>

This concern could be addressed without much of a change to the current API
by returning static NodeLists and/or Collections. Hixie, consider this
feedback on the API. :) We're very unlikely to implement any new APIs that
return live NodeLists/Collections.

Whether addressing that would be enough that we'd be want to ship Microdata
is unclear to me.

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
>