No matter how you feel about the hListing vs. hProduct argument, or Microformats in general, I’m always excited to see experimentation with new and existing Microformats across the web. In an experimental move, we are adding hProduct to all search result, listing pages (faceted navigation), and “shop URLs” (http://www.bestbuy.com/shop/term) on the site with a pre-holiday code deployment.
Admittedly, there is still much work to be done. The source is only a little closer to being truly human-readable, and there are always those “other” things: UI/UX considerations, business “needs”, poor data, and non-semantic markup welded to critical back-end files. In order to get to a better place with hProduct and semantics, I have a personal agenda:
- Get closer to POSH templates with front-end template refresh
- Recognize and perform data cleanup operations, and start teaching out the importance of clean data
- Deploy fuller, more complete hProduct to product detail pages
All this being said, within the confines of this big corporate machine, it feels like progress… or at least a cool experiment that we happened to sneak in without anyone seeing.
Hi Jay,
This is a really nice achievement. You did a great work pushing forward the hproduct format (despite inertia for years on the topic), and seeing live on a big retailer site is really a nice milestone.
What do you think about the status of the hProduct spec? Little activity recently on the microformat discussiong group.
Thanks,
Nicolas
[...] in September, BestBuy is now starting implementing the hProduct microformat on its main site. Via the blog of Jay Myers, lead developer at BestBuy: [...] In an experimental move, we are adding hProduct to all search [...]