Re: Is http://schema.org preferred over http://schema.org? Is https://schema.org wrong?

It does indeed help clarify - thanks again Dan!

On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 1:24 PM, Dan Brickley <danbri@google.com> wrote:

> Let me also answer this here, since I commented in
> https://plus.google.com/u/0/106943062990152739506/posts/8KoJZYvZEfL
> already. The situation is as follows:
>
> "1. the official definition of each schema.org term is via a URL of
> the form e.g.'http://schema.org/Person'. These are the canonical
> identifiers forschema.org terms.
>
> 2. the site happens to also work currently via https://
>
> 3. there is consensus amongst the schema.org partners that they
> considerschema.org markup (in whatever format) in which
> https://schema.org/ is written instead of http://schema.org/ to be
> perfectly ok. For specifics of actual support for this, see each
> company individually.
>
> 4. at this time we (the schema.org team) have not decided to promote
> the https: version of the site over the http: version, although this
> is generally an appealing idea. There are some peculiarities in the
> way the site is hosted and implemented which I want to investigate
> properly first (partially w.r.t. using a naked/apex/bare domain name
> with https)."
>
> Hope this helps clarify,
>
> Dan
>
> On 18 April 2015 at 15:59, Aaron Bradley <aaranged@gmail.com> wrote:
> > To use Thing as an example, both http://schema.org/Thing and
> > https://schema.org/Thing return a 200 response header.
> >
> > Is http:// preferred though, and his https:// actually incorrect?
> >
> > The Meusel and Heiko paper on fixing schema.org errors [1] buckets use
> of
> > "the https protocol" under common errors.  And a cogent Stack Exchange
> > answer [2] says that one should using http, saying "Typically, user
> agents
> > wouldn’t dereference these URIs."
> >
> > So, sponsors/ontologists, what's the official story? :)
> >
> > This keeps coming up because for many months now Google has been
> encouraging
> > webmasters to use https:// for their sites [4].  Because Google has tied
> > this explicitly to improved search engine rankings, the audience most
> likely
> > to consume and act on this information - search marketers - is the same
> > group most likely driving schema.org implementation on their site.  And
> > though it's conflating web page consumption with deferencing of URIs,
> > nonetheless webmasters have been observed using https://schema.org and
> > justifying doing so because of this Google initiative.
> >
> > If https *is* incorrect, then there are thing that can be done to
> mitigate
> > against its use:
> >
> > - State that preference or requirement for http:// in the documentation.
> >
> > - Add a rel="canonical" statement to each schema.org page where the href
> > value uses the http:// form of the URL.  Not only would that send a
> clear
> > message to any human examining the canonical, but send a message ("a
> strong
> > hint" in the words of Google) to the search engines not to index the
> > https:// form, and so they wouldn't be as likely to surface in search
> > results (there are currently 1,890 https://schema.org URLs in Google,
> 31,000
> > in Bing).
> >
> > - Tangentially, use of a canonical would also stop the propagation of
> > www.schema.org URLs (currently just one www page indexed in Google, but
> > 31,800 in Bing).
> >
> > - 301 direct https://schema.org/* to http://schema.org/* - essentially
> > resolving all technical issues with one stroke.  Note that an open GitHub
> > issue [3] proposes redirecting www.schema.org/* to schema.org/* but
> doesn't
> > wrap a secure to non-secure redirect in this, and would actually redirect
> > "https://www.schema.org/Person to https://schema.org/Person".
> >
> > [1] Robert Meusel and Heiko Paulheim, Heuristics for Fixing Common
> Errors in
> > Deployed schema.org Microdata
> > http://bit.ly/1MZdEhO
> >
> > [2] https - Secure and non-secure Schema.org Markup?
> > http://bit.ly/1HE4ZwH
> >
> > [3] CODE: redirect http://www.schema.org/Person to
> http://schema.org/Person
> > · Issue #4 · schemaorg/schemaorg
> > https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/4
> >
> > [4] Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: HTTPS as a ranking signal
> >
> http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html
> >
>