Microdata support

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Elliott Sprehn

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Apr 12, 2013, 3:19:05 AM4/12/13
to blink-dev
We have an implementation of Microdata [1], but it's not turned on in Chromium. Firefox 16+, Zombie-Presto and Maxthon apparently all have support and it's in the HTML5 spec [2].

I also see http://google.com includes some random microdata bits though they don't make much sense to me.

Does anyone know why we never turned it on? Can we turn it on now?

If not we should probably delete it since we don't even compile it in.


- E

Ojan Vafai

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Apr 12, 2013, 3:39:36 AM4/12/13
to Elliott Sprehn, blink-dev
I don't have strong opinions about Microdata as a feature. It seems useful, so I vaguely support turning it on, especially as Firefox already has.

I have one concern with the feature as specced is that getItems and the various Collection returning properties/methods all return live NodeLists/Collections. Does the current implementation do so? I think if we can at all avoid it, we should try to get that changed if we want to ship this. Live NodeLists/Collections impose a large cost on the rest of the codebase and fundamentally make regular DOM operations slower.

Adam Barth

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Apr 12, 2013, 3:43:55 AM4/12/13
to Ojan Vafai, Elliott Sprehn, blink-dev
I have some concerns about the quality of the implementation in Blink.  If we do decide to turn it on, we should first review it for quality.

Adam

Alex Russell

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Apr 12, 2013, 4:32:44 AM4/12/13
to Elliott Sprehn, blink-dev
The current micro data API is...poor.

I think we should write it off and try again. No opinions in what that means for our impl in the meantime, though (other than it shouldn't ship, of course).

I'm happy to put work into a better API if someone will collaborate on impl.

Regards

Dimitri Glazkov

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Apr 12, 2013, 12:52:43 PM4/12/13
to Adam Barth, Ojan Vafai, Elliott Sprehn, blink-dev
I have similar concerns about quality.

:DG<

Ojan Vafai

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Apr 12, 2013, 2:03:05 PM4/12/13
to Dimitri Glazkov, Adam Barth, Elliott Sprehn, blink-dev
Sounds like there are enough concerns with the current code/api that we are not comfortable shipping it. As we don't have anyone actively owning fixing it and it's not even clear any of this code would be useful for an API we'd be happy with, I think that means we need to delete the code for now.

Adam Barth

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Apr 12, 2013, 2:07:48 PM4/12/13
to Ojan Vafai, Dimitri Glazkov, Elliott Sprehn, blink-dev
+1

Jonathan Dixon

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Apr 12, 2013, 3:32:56 PM4/12/13
to Adam Barth, Ojan Vafai, Dimitri Glazkov, Elliott Sprehn, blink-dev, m...@chromium.org
Worth adding an entry to http://www.chromestatus.com/features to record this?


Elliott Sprehn

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Apr 12, 2013, 4:11:16 PM4/12/13
to Ojan Vafai, Dimitri Glazkov, Adam Barth, blink-dev
On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 11:03 AM, Ojan Vafai <oj...@chromium.org> wrote:
Sounds like there are enough concerns with the current code/api that we are not comfortable shipping it. As we don't have anyone actively owning fixing it and it's not even clear any of this code would be useful for an API we'd be happy with, I think that means we need to delete the code for now.


Okay I'll delete the code then. We can always roll out the deletion if needed.

- E 

Max Heinritz

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Apr 12, 2013, 8:45:56 PM4/12/13
to Elliott Sprehn, Ojan Vafai, Dimitri Glazkov, Adam Barth, blink-dev

Max Heinritz

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Aug 7, 2013, 11:57:01 PM8/7/13
to Max Heinritz, Elliott Sprehn, Ojan Vafai, Dimitri Glazkov, Adam Barth, blink-dev
Elliott, did you delete the Microdata code?  Do you know which version of Chrome was the first to ship without it?

Elliott Sprehn

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Aug 8, 2013, 12:20:52 AM8/8/13
to Max Heinritz, Ojan Vafai, Dimitri Glazkov, Adam Barth, blink-dev
I did delete it. We never shipped it, the ifdef it was behind was never turned on.

Max Heinritz

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Aug 8, 2013, 12:34:42 AM8/8/13
to Elliott Sprehn, Max Heinritz, Ojan Vafai, Dimitri Glazkov, Adam Barth, blink-dev
Cool, thanks for clarifying.

Dan Brickley

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Aug 8, 2013, 5:44:10 AM8/8/13
to Alex Russell, Elliott Sprehn, blink-dev
On 12 April 2013 10:32, Alex Russell <sligh...@google.com> wrote:
> The current micro data API is...poor.
>
> I think we should write it off and try again. No opinions in what that means
> for our impl in the meantime, though (other than it shouldn't ship, of
> course).
>
> I'm happy to put work into a better API if someone will collaborate on impl.

I've heard this from a few people now, and would be happy to join any
discussion of better APIs.

Is anyone here aware of uses of Microdata for purposes beyond
schema.org markup?

What was the original intent of the API? Did anyone use it?

Dan

Michael[tm] Smith

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Aug 8, 2013, 10:03:48 AM8/8/13
to Dan Brickley, Alex Russell, Elliott Sprehn, blink-dev
Dan Brickley <dan...@google.com>, 2013-08-08 11:44 +0200:

> On 12 April 2013 10:32, Alex Russell <sligh...@google.com> wrote:
> > The current micro data API is...poor.
> >
> > I think we should write it off and try again. No opinions in what that means
> > for our impl in the meantime, though (other than it shouldn't ship, of
> > course).
> >
> > I'm happy to put work into a better API if someone will collaborate on impl.
>
> I've heard this from a few people now, and would be happy to join any
> discussion of better APIs.
>
> Is anyone here aware of uses of Microdata for purposes beyond
> schema.org markup?

As far as applications that consume content that uses Microdata and that
actually do something useful with it, I don't think there are any
well-known ones other than schema.org.

I know Drupal has some specific support for Microdata but it's not clear to
me that enables anything more than just producing document with Microdata
attributes included (rather than consuming that Microdata content and doing
something special with it).

> What was the original intent of the API? Did anyone use it?

The original intent was just to provide a standard way for the Web platform
to expose the Microdata content of Web documents to scripts.

--Mike

--
Michael[tm] Smith http://people.w3.org/mike

benjamin...@gmail.com

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Oct 23, 2014, 12:52:18 AM10/23/14
to blin...@chromium.org, dan...@google.com, sligh...@google.com, esp...@chromium.org
I'd also be interested in seeing this move forward with an API that folks are happy with. For reference, here's the commit that removed the old microdata support.

Date:   Fri Apr 12 23:11:02 2013 +0000

    Remove MicroData implementation
    
    Per the discussion on blink-dev we should remove the MicroData implementation.
    There's questions of quality, a maintainer, and that no port of WebKit ever
    turned it on.
    
    
    
    git-svn-id: svn://svn.chromium.org/blink/trunk@148315 bbb929c8-8fbe-4397-9dbb-9b2b20218538
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