RE: Schema.org v1.6 release candidate: Roles, various fixes, site navigation improvements

On Wednesday, June 18, 2014 6:47 PM, Aaron Bradley wrote:
> This is not a commentary about the relative usefulness of Turtle, but
> on the intended audience of the site and the profile of its adopters -
> all the points made by Dan Scott.  An optional Turtle tab?  Sure, why
> not.  Turtle as the centerpiece of the code examples?  Only if the aim
> of doing so is alienating most webmasters.
> 
> And I'd use the same logic in arguing against JSON-LD as the default
> view.  JSON, of course, is - unlike Turtle - readily understood and
> used daily by most developers.  But remembering, to Dan Scott's point,
> that schema.org is "a collection of schemas that webmasters can use to
> markup HTML pages in ways recognized by major search providers," it
> makes little sense to emphasize the syntax which is currently only
> tangentially recognized by one of the major search providers in a very
> limited context.

Yeah, that's a good point Aaron. The problem I see with the current "Without Markup" tab is that it provides very little value to web developers which aren't deeply involved in all these discussions. They mostly spend a minute or two to find an example they can copy-paste-adapt into their sites. It's very difficult to see (visually) that Microdata/RDFa really just add a couple of attributes here and there. Look at http://schema.org/Recipe for example. All I get from the "Without Markup" table is "well, unsurprisingly the example is about a recipe". Then, when I jump to Microdata or RDFa I get snippets that are first of all almost 50% longer. It's not easy to see what was added. And in most cases I as a developer can't just copy-paste that example as the structure on my page probably looks completely differently. So if JSON-LD would already be well-supported by all major search engines, the whole experience for web developers would indeed become much much simpler in my (obviously biased) opinion. But unfortunately we are not there yet.

So, what can we do to improve it in the meantime? An idea would perhaps be to not take "Without Markup" that literally. Mark the examples up with HTML but don't annotate them. Then, when switching to another tab, it's much easier to make the connection.


--
Markus Lanthaler
@markuslanthaler

Received on Wednesday, 18 June 2014 22:04:42 UTC