On Feb 1, 2006, at 2:27 PM, John Panzer wrote:
...
Note that the first line is a title which at least currently doesn't
allow markup, and the stock ticker symbol is actually nowhere
mentioned
in the body which does allow markup. So there's a dissonance here
between what the writer wants to display and what we want to be
able to
automatically extract.
If understand things correctly, you guys have a constraint in your
application, but I think it'd be unwise to allow the constraint.
One goal is to ensure that the human readable content is able to
remain the same as today.
I'm not sure what the significance of this statement is.
I think everyone agrees this is a review (right?), but there's a
question about what's being reviewed (the company or its stock); of
course this is a blog about stock picks which suggests the latter.
Right.
IMHO, given the difficulty in seperating the two (company and stock),
I doubt we'll ever be able to create One True Way to Review Stocks.
People confound stocks and companies, though they are not precisely
the same thing. We may just have to live with that.
If this were a VC blog it might suggest the former. In either case,
though, we'd like to be able to mark up the ticker symbol in some
semantic way, and that's the primary goal of this query.
Definitely an open question. I think it requires research. How do
people currently refer to ticker symbols, stocks and companies on the
web?
Here's what I am suggesting based on the parameters that I have
been given.
Could you provide the parameters that you have been given?
One issue we're grappling with is that it's difficult for us to get a
concrete set of requirements which don't amount to 'provide exactly
what
our undocumented proprietary API needs'. So please bear with us as we
try to evangelize microformats.
I understand that you're fighting an uphill battle. I commend you for
even trying. Let us know how we can help, but remember that we need
to keep microformats more general than a particular solution.
<div class="hreview">
<span class="item ticker" title="TWX"/>
<span class="item exchange" title="NYSE"/>
<span class="item country" title="USA"/>
<span class="item expiration" title="20050518T2300-0700"/>
There are a few microformat and hReview fundamentals being
violated here.
1. Visible data. The ticker symbol, exchange, country should be
visible in the text as the reviwer would write them.
We're not happy about this either. We may not have a choice to
start with.
Ok, so you may not have a choice in your application. Fine, but we do
have a choice when it comes to specifying a microformat.
2. Use XHTML 1.0 following Appendix C - Compatibility. Empty <span/>
elements are not compatible XHTML 1.0.
I'm a little confused; it certainly seems to be valid XHTML 1.0 Strict
according to http://validator.w3.org/check. Do you mean that it may
cause problems when served as text/html to some browsers?
If by some browsers you mean WinIE, then yes. Remember, WinIE doesn't
grok xml at all and does everything in html mode.
Sure, but when just discussing a microformat I don't think that's
relevant, is it?
Yes, it is. Microformats must be renderable in existing browsers.
3. There may only be one "item" per "hreview". I thought this
would be
obvious from the spec, but it apparently isn't, and it should be made
explicit. I have added this as an issue to hreview-issues:
http://microformats.org/wiki/hreview-issues
That's a really good point. There's only one logical item of course,
but how to extend hCard to handle additional types of item annotations
isn't clear from the spec or FAQ.
The general answer is that you can always use additional semantic (or
not so semantic) classnames.
Something to add?
So this is presumably acceptable:
<a class="item fn" href="...">Time Warner, Inc.</a>
But doesn't lend itself to automatic parsing of the stock symbol,
which
is a primary goal. Would this be acceptable as a structured "fn"?
<a class="item fn" href="..."><abbr title="NYSE:TWX">Time Warner,
Inc.</abbr></a>
...in which case, perhaps what we really need is a new nanoformat:
<a class="item fn" href="..."><abbr class="ticker"
title="NYSE:TWX">Time
Warner, Inc.</abbr></a>
...though semantically I think this is a bit dubious. Also, it
doesn't
extend very well to additional values/attributes. Thoughts?
As I mentioned above– unless I missed it, there doesn't appear to be
any research on how people refer to stocks online.
Unless we have significant research which demonstrates a specific
behavior here, I would not be inclined to do anything special for
stocks (beyond a normal product/business review).
I think Sujata needs to do more research on the "expiration" business.
It's not at all clear to me if this is something of general use or
something specific to this one application. (E.g., one could
imagine an
hReview extension saying that a review should only be considered valid
for a month, and treated as historical data thereafter. Not sure how
widely applicable this is, nor whether this is really the semantics
that
are desired by our customers.)
The standard question applies again: "do people do this already?"
-ryan
--
Ryan King
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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