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Bug 14508 - The specification should allow authors to just add itemtype as a property without also having to add the itemscope property; this makes using html5 microdata easier and more terse.
Summary: The specification should allow authors to just add itemtype as a property wit...
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: HTML WG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: HTML Microdata (editor: Ian Hickson) (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: HTML WG Bugzilla archive list
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2011-10-19 07:00 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2011-10-25 03:07 UTC (History)
6 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description contributor 2011-10-19 07:00:00 UTC 
Specification: http://dev.w3.org/html5/md/
Multipage: http://www.whatwg.org/C#top
Complete: http://www.whatwg.org/c#top

Comment:
The specification should allow authors to just add itemtype as a property
without also having to add the itemscope property; this makes using html5
microdata easier and more terse.

Posted from: 166.205.137.86
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5
Comment 1 Philip Jägenstedt 2011-10-19 10:03:33 UTC 
Quoting <http://blog.whatwg.org/usability-testing-html5>:

Third, people were confused by the scoping nature of the "item" attribute. Some of our participants never understood scoping at all, and most of the participants who understood the concept were still quite confused by the "item" attribute. We were encouraged, however, by one variant 1 participant's sudden enlightenment when they saw variant 3's "itemscope" attribute, and by the reaction of the variant 3 participant to the "itemscope" attribute compared to the reactions that the other two variants' participants had to their "item" attributes. This is why we split "item" into "itemtype" and "itemscope", instead of just using "itemtype".
Comment 2 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-10-25 03:07:11 UTC 
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document:
   http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html

Status: Rejected
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale: Yeah, we tried that, it actually made things worse. I agree that it intuitively seems like it would make things easier.