On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 5:05 AM, Angelo Gladding <ang...@gladding.name> wrote: > Can an enlightened soul describe in which ways microdata is actually > superior to profiled poshformats?
To me it's not a question of Microdata vs POSH, it's more like Microdata vs class attributes where both are methods that can be used in POSH style data embedding. The main arguments (and I present these without necessarily agreeing!) seem to be: 1. Class is ingrained as a CSS hook mechanism. Most people on this list are fine with class being used for other purposes, but despite that the argument comes up incredibly often that using class is somehow a 'hack'. Microdata overcomes that, so right or wrong, it may be worth ditching class for embedded data just to help uptake. 2. The class space is already populated with lots of ill-thought-out CSS identifiers. This means POSH formats have to attempt crude forms of namespacing (e.g. picking a uniquely-named root element) to try and not collide with existing markup. That works for @class="fn" say, but it's easy to collide with @class="email". Microdata separates out the important stuff. 3. Related to 2, microdata extraction is possible without having to be profile-aware, so for instance microdata can be converted to JSON without knowledge of the vocabulary used. 4. Microdata features some structures like @itemref that help combine disparate data across a document into one Microdata element, which in Microformats would need the slightly hacky rel-include structures that frankly I don't think anyone has been completely happy with. 5. Microdata allows locally-scoped typing using the @itemtype property and a URL, while a POSH format can only do something similar with a document-level @profile. 6. Microdata defines an API for DOM access to Microdata that allows scripts to deal with Microdata-embedded data when doing the same with Microformats involves some fairly heavy DOM parsing. The arguments against Microdata are basically that it's complex, huge, obviously isn't based on any existent markup in the wild, and really doesn't look like an obvious core element of HTML5 so it's weird that it's included in the same spec. -Ciaran _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss