RE: 301 Redirects to prevent some breakage in Linked Data

When the move was made to use https on the schema.org website I also switched to using https for my json-ld context and that broke Bing for quite a while. Because of the mixed signal with the site using https while the canonical is http, there will always be this confusion going on, and consumers would need to support both. It’s not that clear about the canonicals being http. Maybe make the canonical URL more prominent on the pages?

I also find supersededBy can cause confusion, mainly because it’s not easy to spot if a property/class is marked as superseded. Example is https://schema.org/founders to  https://schema.org/founder which I recently had to explain. People have to know what the presence of supersededBy means. In a sense its like a soft 301. Maybe auto add a warning to pages where they have been superseded?

Similar could be done for these common case based mistakes. A simplish solution would be to detect the case is incorrect and either redirect to the correct case version or add a warning. I think the warning may be more helpful as redirects can go unnoticed.

--
Tony

From: Thad Guidry <thadguidry@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, 30 April 2020 12:56 AM
To: schema.org Mailing List <public-schemaorg@w3.org>
Subject: 301 Redirects to prevent some breakage in Linked Data

Problem:
"URL" versus "Url" is showing up in the wild west of our Linked Data web.
Some properties, because of strict naming conventions we have, currently cause some breakage across the Linked Data web (but how much is anyone's guess).

Solution:
It seems there's a few Properties might be best served with a 301 Redirect ?
https://schema.org/thumbnailURL  -->  https://schema.org/thumbnailUrl

http://schema.org/contentURL  -->  http://schema.org/contentUrl

http://schema.org/discussionURL  -->  http://schema.org/discussionUrl

http://schema.org/downloadURL  -->  http://schema.org/downloadUrl

http://schema.org/embedURL  -->  http://schema.org/embedUrl

http://schema.org/installURL -->  http://schema.org/installUrl

http://schema.org/isBasedOnURL  -->  http://schema.org/isBasedOnUrl

http://schema.org/paymentURL  -->   http://schema.org/paymentUrl

http://schema.org/replyToURL  -->   http://schema.org/replyToUrl

http://schema.org/serviceURL  -->   http://schema.org/serviceUrl

http://schema.org/targetURL -->   http://schema.org/targetUrl

http://schema.org/trackingURL  -->   http://schema.org/trackingUrl


Questions:
1. Could 301 Redirects be implemented for a few items on Schema.org?

2. Should 301 Redirects be implemented ?

  *   Maybe this makes developers and publishers too lazy?
  *   Maybe it helps consumers more, (things not breaking as often) and that's good for all?
  *   How do others feel about that?
Thad
https://www.linkedin.com/in/thadguidry/