[whatwg] header for JSON-LD ???

[Michael A. Peters]

When too much is displayed, the website is too busy.

If there are 12 audios in a group, the person can only listen to one at 
a time so it is pointless to have 12 audio nodes present.

But you can display one and have the other 11 accessible via a select 
menu, so that if and when the user wants them, they select the audio 
they want and JS swaps out the audio node.

But if you define your structured data as attributes then information 
about the other 11 is not available to machines that fetch the page and 
want to know what the page offers.

That's why JSON-LD is superior to the other methods of structured data. 
You can have the structured data for all 12 audios since all 12 audios 
are part of the page but only one has an (x)html audio node in the html 
as sent by the initial GET request.

Web pages aren't static, even after the client received the page the DOM 
can be altered without reloading the page.

Structured data separate from the content is the only logical way to 
account for that.

On 07/24/2017 08:00 AM, Jonathan Zuckerman wrote:
> I think one of the best aspects of the web platform is that there can be a
> single node in the network that is accessible to *all*. The linked data
> approach hides the information from humans. The structured data alternative
> you suggest (div display none) still hides the information from humans.
> Here's a better alternative that is accessible to both humans and robots:
> simply *display the div*. What's your objection to displaying this
> information to humans? How can you justify displaying different content to
> different classes of user?
>
> On Sun, Jul 23, 2017 at 8:13 PM Michael A. Peters <mpeters at domblogger.net>
> wrote:
>
>> On 07/23/2017 03:33 PM, Michael A. Peters wrote:
>>> On 07/23/2017 02:42 PM, Qebui Nehebkau wrote:
>>>> *snip*
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I can't speak for anyone else - I can barely speak for myself - but I
>>>> think
>>>> I'd argue that, intuitively, if your structured data isn't logically
>> part
>>>> of your content, there's a good chance that it doesn't belong there at
>>>> all.
>>>>
>>>
>>> It logically describes the content, and because it is separate from the
>>> content it describes, is much easier to manage and inspect and bugfix.
>>>
>>> Just for example, with an audio, I can describe the creator as a person
>>> including the company the person works for etc. in JSON-LD without
>>> needing to have tags in the content for those things to add attributes
>>> to. That's information that is useful to machines especially when
>>> linking different objects from domains together but it isn't necessarily
>>> useful to the person reading the web page.
>>>
>>> So keeping the structured data separate from the content allows richer
>>> details to be added to the structured data for machines to read without
>>> needing to alter the design intended for the human readers of the page.
>>>
>>> Two audiences are thus served without needing to compromise the design
>>> for either, both machine and human.
>>>
>>> But the content for machines doesn't need to be sent to humans where
>>> they don't care about it, hence the desire for a standard header
>>> machines that do want it can send to have it included.
>>
>> A better example.
>>
>> I run an audio site (all legal, no piracy, I'm anti-DRM but also pro
>> intellectual property) where users can select a category.
>>
>> There could be, say, 12 audios in that category, but the web page only
>> displays one. If the user wants to listen to a different audio, they use
>> a select menu. If its the same artist, there's enough info in the data-*
>> attributes of the select menu items to swap the audio node w/o even an
>> ajax call, If different artist, I do make an ajax call because more than
>> just the audio node changes.
>>
>> With JSON-LD I can put structured data for all audios the person can
>> play from that page into the JSON-LD. I can't do that with tag based
>> structured data unless I make a div display display:none to contain all
>> the other audios.
>>
>> I use libxml2 to create pages so I can modify any part of the DOM at any
>> point allowing me to create the JSON-LD from the same data used to
>> generate the page, so it is always in sync. I then can stuff it in the
>> head node at the end.
>>
>> That's not possible with many platforms that send content before it is
>> finished generating all the page, so JSON-LD for many may not have the
>> kind of advantage I can from it, but the ability to describe objects
>> available through user actions (such as select menu) but aren't part of
>> the DOM when the page is sent is a huge benefit to me over tag based
>> implementations of structured data.
>>
>> Hope that sheds some light on why I had an epiphany when I finally
>> stopped to read about JSON-LD.
>>
>> Now, back on topic, a header would be nice so I only have to stuff it in
>> the head when a machine is asking for it ;)
>>