Hi, In Gaia the Systems Front End team is implementing the Pinning the Web design concept [1] which amongst other things represents "pinned" web pages as cards on the homescreen. The goal is that where possible these cards should not just be a thumbnail screenshot of the page, but should be a meaningful representation of key metadata associated with the page based on a particular "type", and even associated actions.
The idea is that these cards could be generated from the Linked Data [2] that many web pages already include for the consumption of search engines (to create "rich snippets" in search results) but which browsers currently ignore. All the big search engines agree on schemas for this data at schema.org [3] but they support multiple formats for encoding this information in a web page including Microdata, RDFa and JSON-LD. In short, there's a format war going on. In the protoype we created [4] we supported some basic use cases by parsing Open Graph meta tags from web pages [5], Open Graph [6] being a kind of simplified form of RDFa. For the real implementation I suggest we investigate supporting one or more formats for Linked Data in web pages (based on level of adoption) and surface them to Gaia through a linkeddatachange event on the Browser API. I propose that the payload of this event should be the contents of the Linked Data expressed in JSON-LD [7]. JSON-LD is a W3C recommendation and can be used to express data from any of the other Linked Data formats. The JSON encoding is particularly suitable for the use cases in Gaia as it can easily be parsed in JavaScript and stored in the places database in IndexedDB/DataStore. The best data I've found so far on adoption of these formats is from the University of Mannheim [8] and maybe suggests that Microdata is on the increase while RDFa is staying relatively constant, but it's far from clear. And this study doesn't include data for JSON-LD usage. In an ideal world we'd support RDFa, Microdata and JSON-LD and convert them all into JSON-LD for consumption in Gaia, but we could also pick a side in the format war based on usage data. Has support for Linked Data been looked into before? Is this something we can get into the platform? Thanks Ben 1. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/17CGWPwu59GB7miyY1ErTjr4Wb-kS-rM7dB3MAMVO9HU/pub#slide=id.p 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_data 3. http://schema.org/ 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiLnRoRjD5k 5. https://gist.github.com/mikehenrty/6c506767b0fb15aaa2d4 6. http://ogp.me/ 7. http://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld/ 8. http://webdatacommons.org/structureddata/index.html _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
