Re: schema.org/WebPageElement and it's subTypes

I revert my previous statement that these properties are worthwhile keeping. Talking to professional developers, I have experienced a lot of confusion about how relevant these elements are for markup. Often, it is quite cumbersome to implement these in non-trivial HTML templates, and I think we should make clear to developers that these properties are really not that useful for search engines. The developers could spend their time in much better ways in other branches of schema.org.

So +1 for deprecating any of those structural elements, unless they are actually needed by one of the sponsors of schema.org.

Martin

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martin hepp  http://www.heppnetz.de
mhepp@computer.org          @mfhepp







> On 19 May 2015, at 22:18, Jarno van Driel <jarnovandriel@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> "Navigational links and breadcrumbs feel like a different category to me as they describe the characteristics/categories of an entire site."
> 
> And what if we deprecate WebPageElement, SiteNavigationElement, Table, WPAdBlock, WPFooter, WPHeader, WPSideBar and just for the navigational links introduce a new subType under ItemList, namely SiteNavigationList?
> 
> 2015-05-19 20:45 GMT+02:00 Jason Douglas <jasondouglas@google.com>:
> Yeah, I don't understand the utility of WP* either. I don't know the history of how they got added.
> 
> Navigational links and breadcrumbs feel like a different category to me as they describe the characteristics/categories of an entire site.
> 
> On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 11:38 AM Jarno van Driel <jarnovandriel@gmail.com> wrote:
> "SiteNavigationElement (a subtype of WebPageElement) is widely adopted"
> 
> So are WPHeader, WPSideBar and WPFooter but is there also any insight into how they are used?
> 
> I've often seen these elements marked up without any properties specified for them, and those that do specify properties often do this in a very inconsistent/creative manner, which is probably due to the fact there are no examples showing how they should be used.
> 
> But before talking about adding examples I'd first like to know whether there's any sense in specifying these Types, isn't this indeed mark up for markup's sake, or are data consumer actually interested in knowing about a page's WebPageElements?
> 
> "Odd to me, though, that BreadCrumbList is not a WebPageElement"
> 
> I'd have to do my best to look up what was said about that in one of the many discussions about ItemList but it has to do with ItemList no longer being a CreativeWork.
> 
> 2015-05-19 20:08 GMT+02:00 Jason Douglas <jasondouglas@google.com>:
> SiteNavigationElement (a subtype of WebPageElement) is widely adopted.  Odd to me, though, that BreadCrumbList is not a WebPageElement as it's a similar use case (just connected to WebPage via breadcrumb property).
> 
> On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 5:33 AM Jarno van Driel <jarnovandriel@gmail.com> wrote:
> Now that mainEntity/mainEntityOfPage are out of the way I'd like to bring up schema.org/WebPageElement, it's subTypes and the 'mainContentOfPage' property.
> 
> For a long time I've been wondering whether or not there's any sense in marking these elements up as they describe the HTML elements on a page, rather than the underlying real world entity that is described by other markup. On top of that their schema.org pages provide no examples on how to use them nor do they seem to have been worked out such that they are easy to specify.
> 
> For example, if I markup an event widget as a schema.org/WebPageElement, how would I indicate the widget contains an schema.org/Event - should I use 'about', 'mentions' or 'mainEntity'? And what if a WebPageElement contains multiple entities, should I then use 'about' or 'mentions' or do we need a new property for this? 
> 
> And what about the relation between WebPage and WebPageElement? 'about', 'mentions', 'hasPart', 'contains' have all been proposed in the past but neither of 'm got any large scale support by the participants of the mailing list. Meaning that until thus far there doesn't seem to exist any valid method for chaining WebPageElement to WebPage or chaining WebPageElement to the entity/entities it contains.
> 
> Dan Brickley once even expressed he was wondering whether these Types aren't a form of markup for markup's sake as opposed to providing any serious value. A point of view which I've step by step have grown to agree with and therefor I wonder, might it be an idea to deprecate WebPageElement (and its subTypes)?
> 
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Received on Thursday, 21 May 2015 09:19:51 UTC