btremI am marking up a food menu to try out different ideas for h-menu, and tried the include-pattern using the object element. I was unpleasantly surprised:
btremI linked an h-card to menu items, but in Firefox, it actually copies the h-card contents in the place where the <object> element is. That actually makes sense from the point of view of the element, but definitely not what I expected.
btremThe pity is that for include-pattern, <link> would probably be intuitive to new authors. Use <link> to link e.g. an h-card to another microformat. Shame.
btremYeah, I see your point. That's why I said for "new authors". Experienced web authors who are new to mf might get confused by a <link> in the body.
btremI already saw the wiki include-pattern page. That's why I tried the <object> element. I was asking about "work on HTML includes since then". Is there work outside of the mf community on linking data on the same page?
[tantek]the short answer to your question is to research what additions have been made to https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/ since 2010 and see if any of those additions would be useful
[tantek]we've been able to ignore the "include-pattern" so far in the evolution of microformats2 because there haven't been any use-cases that required it
btremOk, good advice. Honestly, I've got two different menus, one using <table> markup, the other using <dl> markup. I can simply make sure the h-card is inside a section to solve the problem. But that might not work for web authors. So I was trying out include patterns.
btremI suppose a web author could always add an h-card inside an h-menu and use display: none if the layout doesn't work with the h-card visible in that place. Clumsy, but it would work.
btremWhen I first brought up the idea of an h-menu format, someone (me? [tantek]? [KevinMarks]?) said that a menu could be linked to the restaurant via an embedded h-card.
btremTo hell with Gordon Ramsay! (Actually, even though I worked for /decades/ in restaurants, I don't know who he is, except that he's a "celebrity chef". :-D
[KevinMarks]I have watched a few Kitchen Nightmares (the UK ones are better) and it mostly him saying "clean your **** kitchen. Trim your menu back from 10 pages to a couple of pages of good things made from fresh ingredients." and then his crew tidying and redecorating front of house.
[KevinMarks]Google Local does a decent job of this - I have fixed a lot of places hours myself, but they can claim it and edit, which has been useful recently for those who grasp it.
btremI don't know if I'm too pie-in-the-sky, but it would be nice for local businesses to publish their info on their website and have e.g. Yelp or Google pick it up.
btremSo they wouldn't have to open accounts in every damn service/search engine/etc. and update each one whenever they change something in their business. Like hours, or menu, or whatever.
btremA good way to know if your proposed microformat properties work is to try to use them. Fortunately, I still have two (old) html menus from two different restaurants to try. It's a good way to quickly come across problems. ;-)
btremWhich brings up a question: restaurants often have different sizes for items, e.g., small or large salad, 12" or 16" pizza, schooner or pint of beer. h-product doesn't have an obvious way to handle this. Any thoughts?
btremAlso no way to handle add-ons: add bacon to your burger, $2.00. Add mushrooms to your pizza, 1 pound (sorry, don't have a key for pounds sterling!).
btremOpen Table had a free mobile website builder that had the nice side-effect of locking you the restauranteur into their service. Which made me think it was not a side effect at all. :-/
btremYeah, that is the question? For the website that's read only, not much. But if it were a menu that you could order from that'd be different. And if we were hoping to get e.g. Open Table or GrubHub to pick up the menu without the owner having to reenter the data, then it would matter.
[KevinMarks]if you have a price for an item, you could have the menu show burger £5 with bacon + £2 but mark that up as 2 items that parse to [{"name":"burger","price":"£5"},{"name":"bacon burger","price":"£7"}]
[KevinMarks]well, don't overdo that or you do end up with schema again. It is a back and forth between trying to keep as much information in the plaintext as possible, and adding structure hints as to what is important.
btremI was trying to figure out how to deal with prix fixe menus, too. There's no way to specify choice of in mf. But for now, I'm strongly inclined to KISS. Just apply a price to the whole menu, and put all the choices, for each course, in one large e-description.
btrem edited /menu-examples (+204) "/* T.S. McHugh's Irish Pub */ Adds menu details for items with more complex pricing schemes." (view diff)
[tantek] the short answer to your question is to research what additions have been made to https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/ since 2010 and see if any of those additions would be useful
[KevinMarks] why do you need to include an h-card? if it's a layout issue, could you use grid to move elements around the page?