If you look on microformats.org you’ll see the beginnings of a draft for hProduct. Unfortunately it looks like it hasn’t gotten much attention in the last few years. I fielded an internal request here to start looking into hProduct for our product detail pages, but clearly hProduct really isn’t ready for prime time. There must have been a reason it has basically been abandoned by the microformat community.
Upon further research, I’m seeing that hProduct’s complexity and breadth could be the issue here. Products are so diverse and can carry so many different attributes — how can you possibly marginalize it into a standard microformat without including huge amounts unstructured data?
There’s also a design aspect to this. Our current PDPs have product attributes strewn about the page in a logical “order”. Without muddying the codeblock, how would one introduce or enforce style and visual standards?
I’ve been investigating hProduct myself recently (http://moourl.com/tagsoup) and definitely am disappointed with the lack of enthusiasm for it in the microformat community. Based on mailing list archives and various other comments, it seems the community has decided that hListing is “enough” in this area. I tend to disagree as hListing is really more of a classified listing model and not really a descriptive mechanism for products themselves.
I would also like to revisit it and see if we can get some momentum behind it. Thanks for talking about this.
Hayes