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Comment by swiftcoder | Hacker News Reader

As much as I like the ideas behind the semantic web, JSON-LD feels like the least friendly of all semantic markup options (compared to something like, say, microformats)

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I think the main issue with microformats is most CMSes don't really have a good way of adding them. You need a very capable rich editor to add semantic data inline or edit the output HTML by hand. Simple markup like WikiText and Markdown don't support microformat annotation.

JSON-LD in a page's header is much easier for a CMS to present to the page author for editing. It can be a form in the editing UI. Wordpress et al have SEO plugins that make editing the JSON-LD data pretty straightforward.

That's a good point. I adopted microformats in a static site generator, with a handful of custom shortcodes. It would be much harder to adopt in a WYSIWYG context

Microformats feel like they're ugly retrofitted kludges, where it would have been way more elegant if in among all the crazy helter-skelter competing development of HTML, someone thought to invent a <person> tag, maybe a <organisation> tag. That would have solved a few problems that <blink> certainly didn't.

They certainly are retrofitted, but the existing semantic tags are largely abandoned for div soups that are beaten into shape and submission by lavish amounts of JS and a few sprinkles of CSS (and the latter often as CSS-in-JS). For microformats there is at least a little ecosystem already, and the vendor-driven committees don't need to be involved.

I mean, is anything actually stopping one from adding something like those tags today? Web components use custom tags all the time

Nothing at all. I believe you don't even need to use web components. You can just throw in <my-person>Joe Bloggs</my-person> and that's valid HTML-whatever.

But it's not a standard that is recognised, and so is no kind of metadata format.

Neither were microformats, up until a handful of aggregators started parsing them. We're still kind of stuck in the infancy of semantic markup it seems.

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