I'd like to broach the topic of a "thing" microformat (or design pattern). I don't believe this is a "boiling the ocean" type of topic and I'll outline what I've been thinking about and how it would be used
(1) This would be a simple container "hthing" with all the elements from vCard that would make sense -- fn, url and photo in particular; geo and adr also for things that are in a particular place. I.e. this proposal is fully based on hCard (2) This would be the basis for future "thing" microformats. For example, this morning a "wine" microformat was proposed. If there was a hThing microformat, there would be a solid basis for just extending that with information specific to the wine world; likewise, one could see this being of great use for making car microformats or housing microformats that would be used with hListing [1]. (3) This would fit nicely into existing microformats and may even be an improvement. For example, in hReview [2] there's an explicit container for the people and places being reviewed, but not for things. By having such a container, we ensure that attributes of the thing being reviewed associate with the thing rather than the review (that is, a car being reviewed has 4-wheel drive, not the review has 4 wheel drive; although this is obvious to us it may not be obvious to a machine reader) (4) This may just be a design pattern -- that is, a template for create new microformats in the future. We do see this pattern in use in several places, including the microformats mentioned above. However, I would argue that there's a real benefit for today's parser's knowing there's a thing there, if if future progress means the parser doesn't know what all the attributes are (just the most important ones) (5) If it is a microformat, how we identify the type of thing is an open question -- we could do it like phone number types in hCard or it could be a new class element (or both). The type option is nice because it means we can cover a lot of ground without creating new microformats. (6) There's obviously lots of things that could be added to a hThing microformat that are reusable across many types of things (just sketching here): <span class="hthing"> <span class="fn"> <span class="company">Rosemount Estates</a> <span class="product">Diamond Label</a> <span class="generic">Cabernet Sauvignon</a> (<span class="type">wine</span>) </span> </span> <span class="hthing"> <span class="fn"> <span class="company">Mazda</a> <span class="product">Tribute</a> <span class="generic">SUV</a> (<span class="type">automobile</span>) </span> </span> Regards, etc... David [1] http://microformats.org/wiki/hlisting [2] http://microformats.org/wiki/hreview _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss