[what]

But it's smaller than the proposed data island.

   <script data>
   bizcard={
     name: 'Hendershot's Coffee Bar',
     address  :{
       line   :'1560 Oglethorpe Ave',
       city   :'Athens',
       state  :'GA',
       zipcode:'30606',
       country:'US'
     }
   };
   </script>

   <div>
      <h3><span data="bizcard.fname"></span></h1>
      <span data="bizcard.address.line"></span>
      <span data="bizcard.address.city"></span>
      <span data="bizcard.address.state"></span>
   </div>

Which also won't work for people with javascript disabled. Plus, does Google go through your javascript and figure out what eventually makes it onto the page?

[Kilimanjaro]

Well, templates is another issue, mixed with data island may make it more verbose.

The idea of the data island is to have the data separated from the content and let consumers use the data whenever they need it. I am now studying the possibility to use a link tag and have the data island external, like rss/atom to save bandwidth when 90% of consumers won't care about the data. And for those who care, they just load the external link and there you have it, all the data without scraping.

[jarin]

Google doesn't load JavaScript, that's why they have the AJAX crawling URL scheme: http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/getting-started...

They're the URLs you see on Facebook that have #! in them.