Is anyone thinking about Percussion support for semantic mark-up, microdata and the rest, especially given the recent announcement of common search engine support?
Percussion is very interested in this area, and has built some new things using semantic markup, specifically RDFa for dynamic indexes, including tags and categories. We’ll be talking about this more as the summer unfolds.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear what folks are doing and/or what the interests are.
I would be very interested to know what is meant by “building some new things” (I would assume you mean examples). To me, creating a semantic mark-up seems to be all on the developers of the templates. I don’t see anything that prevents us from creating and using all this fancy new “stuff”…which is a great testament to the flexibility of the system that Percussion offers.
Yes, I agree, template design is the major approach we need to use. All the same, I was interested to see who has used this actively with Percussion.
The immediate interest is that Google et al have stepped up support by promoting their common use of the microdata standard, and that seemed likely to accelerate adoption. I don’t detect that semantic mark-up is in widespread use yet, and smaller sites may struggle unless they get off-the-shelf support.
Like Vern, I’m interested in what others are doing with Percussion.
@jitendra - There’s certainly no reason you could not go “all out” with semantic markup with the system “as is” today.
In terms of what we’ve already announced, we’ve built for CM1 a dynamic index service (runs in Tomcat) that can replace the contents of an auto-index dynamically without that auto-index having to be republished. E.g. you simply publish one new Press Release, and because of RDFa, the dyanmic indexer sees it, indexes it, and can provide it to your “press releases by date” lists wherever they are on the site. Architecturally, it’s very similar to how the “latest tweets” widgets from Twitter work.
Originally, we did this to facilitate a faster “publish now” (or scheduled publishing) mechanism, so that the system would not have to publish all the ancestor indexes each time one new page was published. But it’s being extended for use with Tags and Categories and much more. Also, though built originally for CM1, it’s architected for use with CM System and will be available for that and CM1 at roughly the same time. We’re in pilot with it now, and more on the way.
One challenge we have spotted, in discussing this further today, is that we would need to insert a template where otherwise we might use a managed link. Templates are usually based on DIVs, and those normally start on new lines, which is not always what is wanted if you are simply trying to mark up a reference to an entity.
We tried working round this once previously without great success. I’ll ask the team to look at it again, and we can probably do it, but it’s an example of something that makes it all more complex.