Ian Hickson wrote:
On Tue, 7 Dec 2010, Nathan wrote:
Ian Hickson wrote:
I've used dce: and dct:, since now the example has both.
A general comment, microdata appears to be incredibly verbose for
authors when using multiple vocabularies to describe things, the example
at http://dev.w3.org/html5/md/#examples is almost painful to read, let
alone write.
Is there no way to reduce the repetition of long URIs for properties and
types as illustrated by the Turtle equivalent in the referred to
example? Does HTML or Microdata cater for this in any way?
When we did the usability studies for this we found that in practice (and
much to my surprise) the verbosity had no impact on the usability of the
language, so we didn't do anything to reduce it.
I'd love to see those results, any chance of a link to them? as they
seem to conflict with almost all usage of URIs I've seen in both the
general development community (for instance usage of relative vs
absolute URIs in documents) and in the semantic web community
(widespread use of prefixes everywhere, essentially the same as relative
URIs but where the base differs from that of the "current" document).
Furthermore, in practice, most use cases for microdata don't involve
multiple vocabularies but a single vocabulary explicitly named using
itemtype="", for which the vocabulary's short names are used.
If I understand correctly, that's because microformats constrain
vocabularies to only describing a single type of thing, and this has
spilled through in to microdata thus constraining descriptions of things
to only use a single vocabulary. I'd be very surprised, shocked even, to
find that this covered most use cases, and whilst I can see how simple
usage may be common in the early days, moving forwards ever more complex
usage and descriptions are sure to become common place - just as people
no use far more than just <a> <b> <i> and <p> in html.
Best,
Nathan
