Thread:User talk:GWicke/OutputPage Microdata API/reply (2)

My initial thought was to create an api that could create something like User:Dantman/Output Metadata/Example Output. An api that would let you define multiple Microdata items and anything beyond one global would be appended to the so that it would be parsed. However then you're given the fact that WebPage also uses the body. So I thought of a hack that would make WebPage weighted heavier, ie: if WebPage was used as an itemtype the engine would implicitly make it the one on the body even if another extension inserted something else. But then where's the value in that, especially if another vocab does in fact have a good reason for the same. So it all fell apart.

Originally I was only adding itemprop="" for completion sake. It's something that supported and I was adding support for the property="" attribute.

But right now in fact I can't even find a good reason for it's actual use anywhere at all. The Google +1 button that suggests it's use actually parses OpenGraph data already. I doubt WebPage's name and description attributes give much value given they're already part of standard metadata. Heck WebPage doesn't even have a way to separate name and sitename like OpenGraph does. And I haven't quite figured out what the value of some of the itemprops that actually belong to WebPage are for. Hell, WebPage has a mainContentOfPage that's supposed to be usable to indicate the primary contents, but it uses a WebPageElement and most pages don't have types that fit into that at all.

So I'm with the thought of completely excluding Microdata support till someone comes up with a good hard use case they want to support, at which point we can go hardcode something in for it.

For skins like you think sounds like a good idea. In that case we should add another hook or two to make sure that skins are capable of tweaking the attributes for the tag, etc...

I actually spent most of yesterday reading through RDFa and getting a full understanding of all the rules and properties of it. I actually kind of like it. Microdata still has it's own likeable taste, and RDFa can notably be hard to understand for general users, but still RDFa is pretty good.

If Google et-all are going to work around us, then perhaps in the cases where we do find something we want to do with Metadata on the global page we should try using RDFa even if the data is actually supposed to be Microdata.

((I wonder what Google would think if we started embedding RDFa data onto articles that let them parse out category information))

For RDFa support I haven't thought up the full API yet. However I did consider part of the Sub-API. What do you think of this class User:Dantman/Output Metadata/Namespace API? It's goal is to let us use XML/RDFa namespaces but do it in a clean format way that guarantees that we're not going to have two extensions ever collide with the same prefix for different namespaces.