Hi, I'm a developer of OpenTag - a JavaScript snippet you add to your webpage, which then in turn loads other scripts. Companies can use this to deploy analytics and fire off affiliate/retargeting scripts to tell referrers that something has been bought. You can have a poke around here: www.opentag.qubitproducts.com - feel free to set up an account - it's free(mium).
The scripts that load via our tool need to know a lot about various parts of the web pages that are accessed, eg what and how much has been purchased, so you can, for example, figure out which marketing channel is driving you the most valuable traffic so you can throw more money at them. This is where the whole microformats come in. Previously, to implement these 3rd party scripts, people would scrape the data off their pages to populate the right values using document.getElementById, etc, or just hard code them on the server side to the scripts. The first solution isn't great because if the pages changes then you have to rewrite your scripts, the second solution only solves the problem for a single script, not all of them. The problems with microformats is that it only marks up what is already on the page. If the data isn't there but is necessary then what? The other problem is that it requires web devs to actually go in and alter their website, which falls foul of the, "if it changes and I don't remember about microformats, then everything stops working" issue. I'm totally behind the idea of microformats, and it would be great if these companies would go in and do all this, but it's a big ask (some companies can be slow to move, other companies sites are held together with bandaids and they really don't want to change much). Instead, we've got a simpler solution, which makes it easier to put semantic markup on their site, but doesn't mean they need to go through and markup the main UI of their site. We call our solution universal variables, which we are using as an open standard to allow people to markup their own pages by writing a single javascript variable to their page. Doco is here: https://github.com/QubitProducts/UniversalVariable and you can see it in action here: http://www.superdry.com/mens/fragrance/details/34825/steel-cologne---40ml. This is similar to how Adobe's Omniture uses variables, but is in a much neater format (for a discussion of omniture varibles see http://omnitureconsultant.com/2008/01/27/omniture-tutorial-evars-custom-events-sprops/ ) We have a bunch of sites using this now. It is really easy to implement for these people, especially for people on standard CMSes - all they need to do is import a plugin (eg: http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/catalog/product/view/id/13932/ ) and you have it on your site. What I would like to discuss is how to best integrate this with microformats. I see you are talking about using a parsed JSON approach in v2: http://microformats.org/wiki/microformats-2, but this looks like it is still in preliminary stages. Given that someone has implemented a universal variable spec, would it be useful for us to provide a script that dynamically adds meta tags in the head containing the relevant data (for example like what is being done here - http://www.guess.eu/Guess/IT/Donna/Borse/Satchel/Mavis~Small~Satchel/HWNE3453050-BLA )? The problem I see here is the data is very flat - if you have a shopping basket that contains several items all of which have a title and price, how would you represent that using the meta method? Is it a problem that there is the data in javascript and not in HTML? It does mean that you cannot ignore the javascript in the page. On the other hand I can see that a well marked up site using microformats would be able to recreate a universal variable object very easily. Does this position universal variables/javascript-variables-in-general as some secondary stage? With microformats you can get to universal variables, so you can use scripts that use the universal variable object, but you cannot get to microformats from a universal variable. Is this a flaw in microformats or a necessity to be part of semantic HTML? Have you had this kind of discussion before? I would love to be able to find a way to have these data formats work together. -- Will Becker Software Engineer QuBit http://www.qubitproducts.com/ _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
