Hello,

I never personally paid much attention to microdata before.
However I am coding a CMS and so I have to look at it.

I am having trouble understanding why this isn't at least optionally applicable via an external file using CSS selectors.

For example, a web page could have

<link type="foo/xml" src="microdata.xml" />

microdata.xml then has rules to apply microdata information based upon CSS selectors in the document, similar to how XSL works.

That seems to make a lot more sense to me than creating new HTML attributes, and it is obvious enough of a concept that surely I can't be the first person to have thought of it.

All the examples I looked at of microdata could easily be done that way, and it has a lot of advantages:

A) You can use the same microdata.xml file for many pages, allowing it to be cached, reducing bandwidth.

B) Many CMS systems store content separate from the template, and could have the microdata link tag added to the head node by the template when served, so the pages don't need to all be altered to make use of it.

C) It looks like microdata is mostly useful to bots and crawlers, but most traffic to a web site is not bots and crawlers, so why not have it as an external resource the few clients that want the info can grab.

D) Conceptually, it looks to me like it really is no different than CSS - it applies a style to content. A style for machines to better understand the content, not a visual style, but still a style - so why not use existing CSS selectors that already work well with XML tools?

E) It would allow the microdata to be applied to any type of XML document.

F) It would allow changing the schema(s) used in the future w/o needing to modify the content, making maintenance easier.

Is there a reason it has to be embedded in the HTML itself and is not available as an external file that can be referenced?

I tried to think of one and couldn't.

-=-

Thank you for your time, and I really hope that an update to microformats will allow them to be defined external via CSS selectors, because as far as I can tell, that is the right way to implement this type of thing. It should at least be an option.

Michael A. Peters

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