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Know your hReview

hReview

status

draft

authors

Description

hReview is a simple format for marking up reviews on the web. The schema of hReview was developed as a minimal subset of a broad range of review formast currently being published, by the likes of Amazon, epinions, Zagat, iTubnes and many more, as well as earlier attempts at common review forats, such as RVW, RDF Review Vocabulary, and Simple-Review XML.

Usage

hReview is designed for publishing structured reviews of people, businesses, films, products, websites, and indeed anything that can be reviewed, online.

root

An hReview has a root element, which can be any HTML element, with a class value of “hreview”.

Required properties

hReview has one required property, “item”, with the following futher requirements.

  • When the review is for a person, the item property is an hCard
  • When the review is of an event, the item property is an hCalendar
  • Any item must have at least a nested fn subproperty, for the name of the item. Where the item is an hcard or hCalendar, this will be automatically part of the nested microformat.

Where an item has a photo or url, subproperties of item, with class values of “url” and “photo” should be used to mark these up.

Optional properties

an hReview may have the following properties

Summary
The title of the review itself
type
the type of item being reviewed - one of the following list: product, business, event, person, place, website, url
reviewer
the author of the review. This is an hCard. Where the reviewer is anonymous, the value of the hCard fn is “anonymous”.

For example a review by Francine Smith would have the following reviewer

<span class="reviewer vcard"><span class="fn">Francine Smith</span></span>

An anonymous review would be marked up as

<span class="reviewer vcard"><span class="fn">anonymous</span></span>

dtreviewed
the date on which the review was written or published, in ISO8601 date time format. The abbr design pattern for providing both humanly and machine readable dates and times is recommended.

For example, a review written on May 17th 2007 in Sydney Australia might be marked up

Written <abbr class="dtreviewed" title="20070517">May 17th 2007</abbr>

description

the full text of the review.
rating
the reviewer’s rating for the item reviewed. By default, this is a fixed point integer to one decimal point from 1.0 to 5.0 (for example 2.5 is a valid rating value, 4.99 is not).
Optionally, integer values from a specified “best” to “worst” may be used

For example, a standard score of 4.5 out of 5 may be marked up like this

I gave the film <span class="rating">4.5</span> out of 5

To give a non default rating, we’d have something like

full marks, <span class="rating"> <span class="value">10</span> out of <span class="best">10</span></span>

Other properties

hReviews may also have these properties

version
the version of hReview used for marking up the review
tags
a list of rel-tag tags describing the review. No particular class value is required for the tag links to indicate they are tags, the rel=”tag” value is sufficient for this.
license
to indicate a license for the review, a rel-license link may be added to the review. In this instance, the license applies to the review, and not the page containing the review
permalink
a link with rel values of “bookmark” and “self” indicates the permanent url for the review.

Examples

This example demonstrates the core features of hReview 

<div class=”hreview”>
<h2 class=”summary”>Pirates of the Caribbean 2, Dead Man’s Chest - Disappointing at best</h2>
<p class=”item”><a href=”http://disney.go.com/disneypictures/pirates/” class=”fn url”>Pirates of the Caribbean 2 - Dead Man’s Chest</a> </p>
<p class=”reviewer vcard”><span class=”fn”>John Allsopp</span></p>
<p>Date reviewed <abbr title=”20061118″ class=”dtreviewed”>November 18 2006</abbr>.</p>
<p>Rating: <span class=”rating”><span class=”value”>4</span> out of <span class=”best”>10</span></p>
<div class=”description”>
<p>After the success and excitement of the original Pirates of the Caribbean…</p>
<p>The characters lack any of the real freshness and cleverness of the original, even <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Depp” rel=”tag”>Depp’s</a> Jack Sparrow has become more…</p>
<p>Disappointing, to say the least.</p>
</div>
<p><a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/” rel=”license”>Licensed under a creative commons attribution share alike 2.5 license</a></p>
<p>Review type: <span class=”type”>product</span></p>
<p>hReview version<span class=”version”>0.3</span><p>
</div>

Tools

hReview creator: http://microformats.org/code/hreview/creator
a form driven interface, which produces the microformatted HTML for your review.
Textpattern
Chris Casciano’s pnh_mf supports publishing in the hReview format.
WordPress
Andrew Scott has a form driven hReview plugin, which allows for easy publishing of individual or multiple reviews on a single page or in a single post http://www.aes.id.au/?page_id=28
WP Movie ratings, from Paul Goscicki integrates the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) to allow pain free reviewing of movies, in hReview format. http://paulgoscicki.com/archives/2006/11/wp-movie-ratings-v14-released/

Services

Revoo: http://revoo.com
a review aggregation and publishing service, both aggregates reviews published on the web in hReview format, and publishes reviews in hReview format.
Cork’d http://corkd.com
a wine community site, featuring reviews created using a form driven interface, and published using hReview.
Yahoo Tech! http://tech.yahoo.com
The Yahoo! technology review site uses hReview to publish technology reviews from users.