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schemaorg / suggestions-questions-brainstorming

Suggestions, questions, and brainstorming
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Comments container #223

Open mnot opened 4 years ago

mnot commented 4 years ago

I raised a use case on WICG's discourse:

Many sites now contain user-generated content that is added to the primary content of a page, usually called “comments.”

Many users want control over whether they see this content; it is often viewed as distracting, distasteful, and in some cases, damaging. “Ignore the comments” has become a shorthand for acknowledging that allowing people to add their thoughts to more well-researched content often results in an overall lowering of quality, as well as a waste of time for users.

The Web platform should give users control over whether they see content that they might perceive as low-value. A new HTML element would allow sites to mark up this kind of content so that browsers and other user agents could automatically remove it, if the user expresses a desire to do so.

This is better than site-by-site preferences, which are onerous.

Initial implementation in browsers could be done in extensions. The exact semantic of would be need to be carefully described, so that it was clear that if the primary content of a site were user-generated content, it would not apply (but comments on that content might be in-scope).

... which ended up with a suggestion to bring it to schema.org. I did so in this thread.

After discussion with @danbri at TPAC2019 (oh, the days when we could fly), this seemed to be the resolution:

My takeaway is that a new type that's along the lines of WebPageElement might do the job; e.g., something like WPCommentBlock or WPUGCBlock (both of which would nicely aligned with WPAdBlock, I think).

See also this similar proposal.

danbri commented 4 years ago

I forget the details of our discussion but there is a weird kind of mismatch between even microdata + rdfa markup, and native HTML. The RDF-ish model of these languages is that tagged text is telling you something about the outside world --- about a JobPosting, an Event, a Book or whatever. While it gets a little closer when the types are things like WebPage, WebPageElement, Comment, Question and so on, there is still a hard-to-articulate disconnect between the markup elements and the things they describe. It's like they are using the markup to talk about a parallel thing, rather than telling you more about the markup.

(I say this in full knowledge that schema.org has all these types like WebPageElement!)

The original positioning of Microdata was a bit closer to what you're looking for but I don't think it every really caught on as an HTML extension mechanism in that vein.

Maybe just using RDFa/Microdata and these types could still meet your needs? If you can show it being used and useful I'd happily work with you to get it into Schema.org...