Out of the Recipe format development happening on uf-new I came across an interested concept that hasn't come up yet in previous microformats:

Quoting Andy Mabbett, then myself:
Whether an ingredients is optional or required is important (again,
consider the "ingredients to hand" use case).

Agreed, that's a very good use-case. Needs to be included in a language-agnostic manner but writing ‘3 sprigs of parsley (optional)’ is familiar. I would think that ‘Required’ is implied by the absence of ‘Optional’.

In this case, we have a property established for the format which is either present or absence. An ingredient is either optional or not. So, lets say you have this in English:

<span class="ingredient">3 Strawberries <span class="optional"> (optional)</span></span>

Or this in French:

<span class="ingredient" lang="fr">3 Le Strawberries <span class="optional">(en option)</span></span>

From a parsing POV, we're only interested in whether ‘optional’ is present or not. If it's absent, we'd be assuming ‘required’. We'd be using a pattern whereby the property value is determined from presence or absence of the element, not by the value of it.

Now of course this application is early days and we may yet find further requirements or different ways of doing it, but I like the idea of the pattern as it's language agnostic. Also, I think ‘Presence of Property’ is a pretty snappy name.

What would people think about this sort of parsing rule being added to the microformats cannon?

Ben
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