hProduct parsers and crawlers, rejoice — there is an even better reason to use bby.com shop URLs… if you knew what they were. A while back, a forward-thinking gentleman had the insight to put these human-readable URLs on the site, which deliver a result set of products, based on term. Now that an experimental version of hProduct has made it out to the site on some pages, it could be a nice asset for people to use.

In simple terms, a query looks like this:
http://www.bestbuy.com/shop/term

Some examples:
http://www.bestbuy.com/shop/cartman
http://www.bestbuy.com/shop/eee

More complex example with additional search parameters:
http://www.bestbuy.com/shop/tv+samsung+1080p

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.

Do I mean nothing to you anymore? I mean, we sit in these meetings together and you pretend like I don’t even exist. Take yesterday for example: one of your cronies even said something like, “I don’t consider it code, like in the truest sense of the word”, or something along those lines. Oh, the arrogance and ignorance you portray sometimes. You and your buddies pacify me for a while, listening as I name off a growing list of needs that will help drive our business and utilize true and open standards for our markup, providing rich user experiences and a more informed consumer. But at the end of the day I always seem to come in last. The important conversations eventually trail off into some incomprehensible business cliche-ridden rant, in which the “action items” are really never acted upon.

Let me be frank. I am important. I provide lightweight, semantically rich markup DIRECTLY to the browser. I sit at the heart of most “Web 2.0″innovation (I hate to use the term, but I feel it’s the only language you might understand). While you languish in the background, stumbling over little details and wasting time in futile attempts to get it right, I am out there doing things that make a difference in an agile and cost-effective way.

I realize you may be a little threatened by all the focus on my front-end, as your bloated back-end has been used to all the attention for a while. There’s no shame in admitting that you don’t quite get what I do. It’s time to admit that the times are changing, and you should change as well, or I fear we will have to part ways – me, innovating, changing and evolving, and you, wallowing in yesterday’s glory years.

Oh, by the way, I’m platform AGNOSTIC… and it’s fantastic.

So I’ve been preaching web standards for a while here at work. The trouble I’ve had with that is our technology folk always want concrete examples of what standards are — they want to quantify it, make it a number. “How big should a page be?”. “How many divs should we have on the page?” These phrases have been regurgitated by the higher-ups and the standards-challenged. Just the lack of understanding, even by the supposed front-end “experts” we’ve hired to do this work is nauseating.

I believe, however, I may get some sort of relief from the sickness I’m feeling. I was tooling around microformats.org when I happened upon a concept that I believe embodies the premise of my arguments to these people — the Plain Old Semantic HTML (POSH) methodology. Man, have I been ignorant to this acronym for the last 5 years. Simple, semantic markup that benefits the web and creates semantic not presentational code. Beautiful.
This is my new tool to combat bloat, non-standards and ignorance.