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Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

Seems that if you use this, your documents won't be able to be considered 'valid' by validators (tested on the w3 validator). Unless, perhaps, you just mark your doctype as html and be done with it?

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> Seems that if you use this, your documents won't be able to be considered 'valid' by validators

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

some tools will throw out misleading errors on 'invalid' markup, and you will have to spend time justifying to clients why these invalid markups are OK. accessibility tools might have problems (not sure now, but I remember some tools years ago having problem on some invalid markup).

Not likely, few clients even know what markup is. I'll take the extra traffic and suffer the occasional nosy client any day.

I've dealt with state agencies and higher ed depts that get their dander up over this sort of stuff.

Exactly, I wonder why they wouldn't incorporate the data-* attributes to help describe this data AND conform to HTML5 specifications.

Looks like they're using HTML5 microdata: http://dev.w3.org/html5/md/

The HTML data-* attributes are intended for private data only; i.e., to store data to be used as configuration for a Javascript plugin but which does not hold semantic value and cannot be represented as actual content, whereas microdata (which is what theyre using and is also part of the HTML5 specification) is meant only for describing how the content of the page maps to some schema.

Which format and scheme, with which doctype did you use to get invalid results in the validator?

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.

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