Hi,
I'm interested to see more rich semantics (such as made possible in Text
Encoding Initiative documents to become available in HTML (e.g., toward
making markup more conveniently and richly queryable on sites like
Wikisource)), but this concern relates to data-centric markup as well.
Without stepping into a microformats/RDF-a debate (especially since it
appears microdata is the one that is being successfully formalized), I
would like to recommend that extensible data-*-like attributes become
available to be associated with microdata items, but which do not
impinge on the intended private nature of those data-* attributes.
Perhaps "item-*" could be reserved for this purpose?
This would prevent the need for such ugly hacks as:
<span id="UnitedNations" style="display:none;" itemprop="orgName"
item-placeName="New York">United Nations</span>
...
<blockquote itemscope="itemscope" itemtype="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0";>
<span itemprop="who" style="display:none;">#United_Nations</span>
We the Peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding
generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has
brought untold sorrow to mankind...
</blockquote>
For the latter portion, one could instead just do:
<blockquote itemscope="itemscope" itemtype="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0";
item-who="#United_Nations">
We the Peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding
generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has
brought untold sorrow to mankind...
</blockquote>
Incidentally, as for the existing property names, I'd think changing the
item properties to "scope", "itype", and "prop" would make for much
cleaner, more appealing and readable code.
Thanks,
Brett
