Understanding Microdata, now with more understanding

Okay, I’m giving this whole HTML5 microdata a shot for real. 4475 HTML pages of it in fact.

After reading what Hixie wrote, tried creating a new sample. Didn’t feel any stranger then the markup for RDFa. From a typing perspective, it is annoying to have to type the whole URI, from a reading perspective it’s much clearer what’s going on, at least to me. I also won’t be typing these every time, template systems are neat like that. Now as far as I can tell the XHTMLy solution to this using XML entities is not supported in HTML5.

Should have known better then to jump right from the sample into doing template markup. Having spent the morning making sure that I was producing valid HTML5, the addition of microdata caused errors at Validator.nu. It seems the method of using <link> elements is not currently supported by the validator. In fact even our sample fails to validate. Ugh.

Philip’s parser works nicely for testing to see if what I have is working, given that I can’t use the validator.

At this point I have markup for the relationships of Manifestations of an edition (Expression). Adding the markup for the publication dates was much more unpleasant. It seems that I have to repeat the whole:

<some_tag
     itemprop="http://vocab.org/frbr/core#embodiment"
     item="http://purl.org/vocab/frbr/core#Manifestation">
     <link itemprop="about" href="${product.subject}">

every time I need to talk about ${product.subject}. And the microdata parser happily adds the relationship all over again.

  <http://vocab.org/frbr/core#embodiment> <urn:x-domain:oreilly.com:product:9780596007683.BOOK> ;
  <http://vocab.org/frbr/core#embodiment> <urn:x-domain:oreilly.com:product:9780596806316.BOOK> ;
  <http://vocab.org/frbr/core#embodiment> <urn:x-domain:oreilly.com:product:9780596802189.EBOOK> ;
  <http://vocab.org/frbr/core#embodiment> <urn:x-domain:oreilly.com:product:9780596802028.SAF> ;
  <http://vocab.org/frbr/core#embodiment> <urn:x-domain:oreilly.com:product:9780596007683.BOOK> ;
  <http://vocab.org/frbr/core#embodiment> <urn:x-domain:oreilly.com:product:9780596806316.BOOK> ;
  <http://vocab.org/frbr/core#embodiment> <urn:x-domain:oreilly.com:product:9780596802189.EBOOK> .
    .

There is a great deal of markup smell coming from this page now. I think from here I’m going to try this as XHTML (5?) and go back to RDFa and see how that goes.

Will send this and earlier post to WhatWG mailing list as soon as my subscription to the WhatWG mailing list is approved.