Mike Dierken wrote:
My view on microformats are that they are used to describe 'my stuff'
or 'my opinions about stuff'. Documents coded with microformats are
managed by people and there is just enough balance between user
experience needs and automation that some amount of interchange is
possible. For a product microformat, I would imaging that it's up to
some other system to intelligently index and merge all those documents
into a global product authority database. That database might be
exposed via a more strict product data format than a microformat,
since it isn't directly managed by people.
The different use cases I can think of are
- I only know about one product
- I don't care about other products
- I don't know the identifying characteristics of other products
- I want my product to be a unique product to avoid competition/comparisons
- Its too much work to figure out which particular product my product
is equivalent to
- My idea of equivalence isn't compatible with other peoples (is a
paperback copy the same as a hardback copy of the same novel?)
(semantic equivalence - like beauty - is in the eye of the beholder)
I think part of the problem I have, getting my head around this stuff,
is in trying to find 'real world' uses. The use cases you have listed
are, in my eyes, theoretical. I wonder if you wouldn't mind providing
some examples of where you (as an end user of a proposed product
microformat) would want to mark up some text describing a product.
There was a post on the structured blogging list recently about someone
having marked up a couple of (h)reviews on their blog and then asking
what the point was. In the case of hreview I can at least see some
benefit (but then I'm probably biased). As it stands I'm struggling to
find any real uses for marking up products.
Chris
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