hReviewFeedback
I’ve just now read through the proposed spec forhReview.
Here are some thoughts I have on it:
First, I’m not sure how I’d review a TV show or movie. Item type is limited to {product, business, event, person, place, website, url}. I guess a movie could fall under ‘product,’ but I’m not sure. I really don’t know where a TV show would fit in.
Secondly, having said that, it seems there would be a good number of things to be reviewed that have some degree of duality to them- for instance, a DVD movie is not the same as the VHS or cable version of the same movie, yet they obviously have a lot in common. I’m not sure how’d I’d review a movie and be able to make a comment about just the DVD version. Of course, hReview is supposed to be simple, so situations like this can probably be ignored for now.
I think the spec should state that many of the values can actually be plural. For example, I think the ‘reviewer’ item could be plural, as there are often co-authors of reviews (Siskel and Ebert style). I guess in these situations is may be better to either seperated the review into two seperate versions, or to create a multidimensional review, with two people’s reviews within the one structure. Of course this is more complexity that may easily be ignored.
The only other value that would likely be plural is the tags element and the example code is already showing use of an unordered list for this.
The only other ideas I have related to the format are specific to music reviews and the spec states that it is to remain general at this point, so I’ll hold back on those.
Overall I’m excited about the format and think it has great potential, especially given the input it has recieved from various companies.
May 4th, 2005 at 10:29 am
Ryan,
This is great feedback. Let me see if I can answer some of your questions.
First, the item type was deliberately limited to a very coarse set of values in order to avoid getting drawn into a huge taxonomy design problem.
To note that the item you are reviewing is a restaurant, or a movie, or a tv show, you would simply add the appropriate tags to the review. E.g. a review of a restaurant should include the tag “restaurant”. This makes a lot more sense, since the number of different kinds of things that could be reviewed is so numerous and varied, that tagging works better than an preset set of categories. Similarly if you wanted to distinguish reviewing a DVD vs. a VHS version of a movie, you would use the respective tag.
Second, the comment about multiple reviewers is interesting. Though it certainly seems like a possibility, I think that would only make sense in situations where the reviewers collaborated on the entire review, the description, the ratings, the tags etc. That’s atypical, as even in the example you give (Siskel and Ebert), they make different comments (description), and often have a different thumbs up vs. down (rating) as well. Thus such typical “multiple author reviews” are really multiple reviews of the same item.
I hope that helps answer some of the questions/issues you raised.
Please feel free to also add hReview questions to the FAQ at http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/hReviewFAQ and general feedback at http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/hReviewFeedback
Thanks,
Tantek
May 4th, 2005 at 10:51 am
Regarding the multiple reviewers issue, I agree that what we’re talking about is really multiple reviews of the same subject. However, what it there are many reviews (Amazon style), all on one page? It seems to me that it would be nice to not have to repeat the item description info.
May 4th, 2005 at 11:17 am
In that case, you could simply provide the name & URL of the item with each review, which would link to the rest of the item description info.