Hi Paul, Catching up on my hProduct work here...
I wanted to address the topic of subcategories. I think that many subcategory-specific values may be addressed in the p-v section of the hProduct microformat. I agree that there are many universal product attributes that can be addressed using the base hProduct spec, and it would be worth it to continue foundational work. Speaking of category, the current foundation hProduct brainstorm schema doesn't include any mention of product category. I could envision adding category and subcategory nodes (ala category "breadcrumbs") to help identify product cats and subcats. Thoughts? Thanks, Jay Jay Myers Lead Web Development Engineer Online Solutions, BestBuy.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] (w) 612-291-4007 (twitter) @jaymyers -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Paul Lee (???) Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2008 12:20 AM To: microformats-new@microformats.org Subject: [uf-new] hProduct progress (reply) Hi Jay, Just had two points to chime in on: 1. Reading over the page, sounds still a bit early to call it hProduct. =) 2. That said, I agree with you that there's a case for a separate format. The hListing proposal page makes it clear that it simply wasn't designed to address retail products, for instance: "We are focusing on providing "just enough" structure to enable matching, not to consummate transactions. This is distinct from the majority of formats described on the wiki under listing-examples, which are specific enough to completely describe products for retail sale according to the idiosyncratic semantics of particular merchants and shopping engines. Instead of encoding retail-oriented fields such as UPCs, SKUs, and manufacturer part numbers, this proposal acknowledges that many listings are for "inventories of one" that may not have such precise abstractions." A product microformat could help fill the gap for information like condition, brand, MPN, and unique product identifiers (UPC/EAN, ISBN). 3. Of course, that leads to the question: What about all the product subcategories? My sense from reading archives is that that might be part of the reason why discussion on product has died out - it's a pretty behemoth task to design for tens of highly diverse categories, with their own subcategories, many of which are still evolving. I think, however, there's a lot of value in focusing on the common ground across all products, and the value that that can add in and of itself, as well as as a foundation for future work on subcategories. Paul Google Product Search [uf-new] hProduct progress Jay Myers jmyers at visi.com Wed Aug 6 14:59:06 PDT 2008 All, There is work being done on new standards and reviving the hProduct microformat. During the course of this effort, people have pointed to hListing as a more viable, mature format for displaying product data. We proponents of hProduct feel that a separate hProduct uF would be more granular, and provide more specifics around the products, which often are more complex and have important attributes that are outside of the scope of hListing and others. Please see the updated brainstorming and draft proposal wiki pages for more information on the updated schema. Nonetheless, there are still correlations between hListing and hProduct that can't be ignored. It has been suggested that hProduct be used in conjuction with hListing to enhance the semantics of that format, where hProduct would live under .item. This I agree with, but I would still propose it also be used separately. I would appreciate any thoughts or ideas you might have around the revival effort of hProduct. Thanks, Jay _______________________________________________ microformats-new mailing list microformats-new@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-new _______________________________________________ microformats-new mailing list microformats-new@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-new