Introducing schema.org: Search engines come together for a richer web

I'm guessing this is like salt... a little dash'll do it.

If your website employs an SEO or webstandardista, you should already have your sites marked up with metadata. Reviews and rich breadcrumbs etc. have been around and supported for years now.

I suppose that since Google wants to solve these problems algorithmically first and foremost, that many of these structures already get recognized. Right now you don't _have_ to mark-up your breadcrumbs, for them to still appear as rich snippets on your search result listing. Google recognized the structure without added mark-up.

For now, I will build the new types in my CMS like a good web developer. That won't cost me any time in the future, and now I'll have a way to separate myself from those that won't add schema's or metadata to their mark-up. So, at the end of the day, I just got more expensive :)

https://gist.github.com/1005688

I like this quite a bit better.

Schema.org is doing it with the SEO angle: mark up your pages like this, and they'll be presented better in search engines.

With VIE (https://github.com/bergie/VIE) we take a different angle: mark up your pages with RDFa, and they'll become editable.

Most mainstream users are not tech savvy. Imagine a traveling person arrives in a city and spontaneously decides to see a movie. They enter the search 'good movie playing in nowheresville'. As it stands now their query will likely be matched by the keywords 'movie', 'playing', and 'nowheresville'. The returned results might include a news article about local theatres, with no actual focus on reviews. The searcher might get frustrated and just decide to rent a movie instead. However, with schemas in wide use search engines will know exactly what web sites are talking about movies and whether it's in the context of reviews. The searcher can then be passed on to the relevant site.

In other words, do you think it's better to tell search engines this is sort of what I have or this is exactly what I have?

I guess it could actually hurt them as well. If users aren't providing information back to the algorithm in the form of a click through related to a search term, don't the search engines also risk losing a key signal of relevance?

But you don't have to use microdata or microformats; you can still use this schema with RDFa on an XHTML page.

You should be able to express everything in Microdata _and_ RDFa. I don't think RDFa is semantically richer than these other formats.

The differences as I understand them are three: * schema.org has an implicit vocabulary, if you want to use more than one you can stil use RDFa and use the schema.org vocab explicitly * some syntactic hacks are missing (curies, chaining) but these do not remove expressiveness. Again, implicit schema. * typed literals are missing. And once more, not really needed when the schema is only one

I still would have preferred if they had used straight RDFa 1.1, but I think their main motivation is that the way the web is going (HTML5) does not seem to be the same it was when RDFa was initially invented (xhtml).

This solves concrete a finite set of problems now, while in the semweb world people still have to agree on how to express a person's name :/

It seems that they chose Microdata over RDFa because the latter's syntax was deemed to be unwieldy.

It's not really true that RDFa is more extensible than microdata, there are a small number of missing features related to XML data, but nothing too significant for these use cases; see, for example, [1]

[1] http://bnode.org/blog/2010/01/26/microdata-semantic-markup-f...

Chicken recipe where calories<=350 and carbs<=20g

Let us say we both link to http://schema.org/docs/search_results.html#q=test and http://schema.org/docs/search_results.html#q=product .

Since it is a hashtag we link to, all the link juice will get consolidated in the search page, which passes it on to the rest of the site.

If we had linked to http://schema.org/docs/search_results.html?q=test and http://schema.org/docs/search_results.html?q=product we would have created two (low-quality and near-duplicate) pages in the google index.

The same principle applies to pagination. If you can do javascript pagination #page=2 vs. dynamic pagination ?page=2 you are nearly always better of with the hash pagination. If you do it right, you get the benefit of a single page, with the added bonus of being able to bookmark a certain page and having browser history working.

There's a lot on schema.org for social media websites/business lookup but should be more for open data. I was looking for a linked data schema to represent financial transactions (X paid Y $999 for Z) but schema.org only goes so far as Sales. XBRL explictly states it is not for "A transaction level activity".

    <link rel="data" type="data/json" href="http://example.com/recipes/chicken.js" />
    <link rel="data" type="data/xml" href="http://example.com/recipes/chicken.xml" />

Here is the html:

    <div itemid="1234">Chicken marsala</div>
    <div itemid="1235">Fried chicken</div>
    <div itemid="1236">Chicken curry</div>

    {
      head:{
        title:'',
        source:'',
        version:''
      },
      items:[
        {
          id:'1234',
          type:'recipe',
          title:'Chicken marsala',
          ingredients:'here...'
        },
        {
          id:'1235',
          type:'recipe',
          title:'Fried chicken',
          ingredients:'here...'
        }
      ]
    }

    <data>
      <head>
        <title>here</title>
        <source></source>
        <version></version>
      </head>
      <items>
        <item id="1234" type="recipe">
          <title>chicken marsala</title>
          <ingredients>here...</ingredients>
        </item>
        <item id="1235" type="recipe">
          <title>fried chicken</title>
          <ingredients>here...</ingredients>
        </item>
      </items>
    </data>

Microformats should never invalidate any doctype as they are just class-names.

Microdata can be used in valid HTML5 doctype pages.

RDFa can be used in valid xHTML+RDFa doctype pages.

Why would I care? What matters to me is that Google gets people to my site.