

HTML5 Microdata: Why isn't anyone talking about it? - briancray
http://briancray.com/2010/09/08/html5-microdata/

======
kilian
Because it's boring. And no browser implements it. You're not doing anybody
any favors by implementing it. That google rich data thing? It's done with
html classes too, that works equally well, and we've had them for a while now.

Seriously, I like microdata, I think it's useful, but this kind of utopian,
far-away 'we should use this because it might be better in the future' never
got us anywhere. _That_ is the lesson we should learn from XHTML2, not 'adding
more attributes is cool'.

~~~
eli
Well put. I think there are _very_ few examples of when people actually
implemented a spec that didn't provide an immediate, personal benefit.

~~~
akozak
There are interesting ties to game theory here. You might see it as a variant
of the Prisoner's Dilemma (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_dilemma>).

On the other hand, you might argue that it's simply a coordination problem
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordination_game>).

In any case, it's somewhat shortsighted to look for immediate, personal
benefits. Of course you need to look at the payoffs for implementing a spec,
but I think it's wrong not to take longer-term possibilities into account.

------
neilk
Until recently, one of the biggest publishers of such microdata (in its
earlier incarnation, microformats) was Upcoming.org, an events startup
acquired by Yahoo.

Gordon Luk, the lead engineer, wrote an excellent post describing his
frustrations with microformats:

    
    
        [...] my experience with being a microformat publisher 
        has shown that things are exponentially more complex 
        than they let on in the “sales pitch.”
    

\-- [http://getluky.net/2009/01/08/a-warning-about-the-real-
cost-...](http://getluky.net/2009/01/08/a-warning-about-the-real-cost-of-
microformats/)

HTML5 Microdata seems slightly more rigorous and abstract, but still,
commingling presentational HTML with an informal data API is just asking for
trouble.

------
zdw
The real reason for this, IMHO, is one of the last points of the article - No
major browser has embraced it as a core feature. Getting this into say Mozilla
or Safari would go a long way to make it standardized.

Also, I'm waiting for a usable "Receipt" microdata - imagine buying something,
then when you get to the receipt page, it gives all the information about the
transaction, ready to go into your financial management software, or into a
program to keep track of the packages being shipped to you.

Then again, this may be because I hate Intuit with a passion...

------
pbhjpbhj
I've used <http://microformats.org/> in the past for marking up dates,
addresses and the like.

Looking at the examples on the Google page
([http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...](http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=185417))
of marking-up breadcrumb links though there is a clear step away from clean
functional markup. It looks like the sort of code people make (have made) to
add styles to containers and what not. Couldn't semantic info be simply added
in any tag available thus:

<a href="/a.htm" typeof="breadcrumb1">a</><a href="/b.htm"
typeof="breadcrumb1">b</> ...

Why would that be so hard?

Perhaps further detail could be added by having a typeof-sheet that references
the id of a node and details the information it presents (like external CSS).

~~~
alanh
Microformats.org abuses <abbr> and title="", hurting usability and
accessibility.

Microdata provides a less horrific way to express the data in question.

------
cageface
Arbitrary semantic data on the web at large is DOA, just like the semantic
web.

If you think about it, a big part of the appeal of facebook is that, for many
people, it solves all the actual problems semantic markup is supposed to be
able to solve.

------
wcoenen
The article dismisses XHTML with little explanation: "all the ideology
surrounding XML that never came to fruition".

AFAIK the goal of XHTML was extensibility and interoperability with other data
formats, by allowing arbitrary XML elements from other XML namespaces to be
embedded. It seems to me that this solves exactly the same problem (as
microdata) and more in a much cleaner way. Why invent yet another format?

~~~
Someone
Neither solves 'the problem', if one describes it as 'make all/most web
content semantically richer'. Both just provide a mechanism, but nobody is
going to invest in tagging their data without a good use case. so, it is sort
of a chicken and egg problem.

Worse, marking up my data in the database from which I serve my web pages may
benefit me, but currently, marking up my data in my web pages just costs
bandwidth.

------
frobozz
From the article: "Unlike all the ideology surrounding XML that never came to
fruition, Microdata is already being adopted by Google as part of their rich
snippets to aid in providing richer search results"

O RLY:
[http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...](http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=146898)

~~~
estel
Huh? They support RDFa, Microformats and Microdata (relatively) equally.

~~~
frobozz
Exactly - the author has a clear anti-XHTML, pro-HTML bias, even to the point
of telling us that Google don't support any XML-born technology.

------
fauigerzigerk
"XHTML provided no actual benefit"

Yes it did provide great benefits that are now being destroyed. The benefit
was that we actually had working, up-to-date XHTML parsers in each and every
programming language. Message to web designers: Some people have to parse the
crap you put in those pages and it's not just the browser makers! I know HTML
parsing was never an exact science even with XHTML, but at least we were
moving in the right direction.

~~~
pornel
XHTML1 depends on DTD for entities, which means that parser must fetch DTD
from w3.org (from heavily-hammered server) or support DTD catalog and have one
set up in the system (rarely available out of the box, not always possible to
do). IMHO that breaks "works everywhere out-of-the-box" promise, and sometimes
it makes it easier to just use HTML parser.

It's been _11 years_ since XHTML recommendation was published, and you _still_
can't rely on XML parser for reading content on the web. Even documents
labelled as "XHTML" are often ill-formed (and almost all of them are sent as
text/html). Even if we were moving in the right direction, we were moving too
slowly. Now that HTML5 parser is specced, it may be quicker to add it to
popular languages than turning whole web around.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
I agree that the DTD issue is a nuisance but it's a nuisance that can be
solved in a few hours. XHTML has not solved all parsing problems but the
quality of parsing results is infinitely better than it used to be a few years
back because most websites do actually use well-formed XML (at least most of
the ones I'm parsing).

I don't understand why we need yet another slightly incompatible pointy
bracket syntax. Adding that syntax to all languages and ironing out all the
quirks will take years and it won't replace the existing mess. It will just
add to it. I see no progress at all. It's a pointless waste of resources.

~~~
briancray
I'd say that being able to parse XHTML isn't any easier than parsing HTML in
that both requires an author who writes strict code. There's HTML strict, too,
ya know.

------
Kilimanjaro
Keep markup, style, script and data separated.

Microformats and microdata don't obey the first law.

~~~
ElbertF
How does one keep markup and data separated in XML/HTML?

~~~
Kilimanjaro
<http://mylittlehacks.appspot.com/dataislands>

------
poundy
I think this is what Facebook wants to be with OpenGraph!

~~~
alanh
That doesn't make sense. Care to elaborate?

------
mikecane
Why it matters: Dumb eBooks Must Die, Smart eBooks Must Live
[http://ebooktest.wordpress.com/2009/07/21/dumb-ebooks-
must-d...](http://ebooktest.wordpress.com/2009/07/21/dumb-ebooks-must-die-
smart-ebooks-must-live/)

Why Publishers Fear Metadata <http://www.knowthyshelf.com/?p=30>

Stop thinking it's limited to web browsing.

