RE: Flattening Microdata

Evan, could you explain why you want to do this?

 

My understanding is that this is discouraged behavior.  Search engines
don't trust metadata that isn't visible to users.  The library community
got very excited about using meta tags years ago and then discovered
that they were being ignored.

 

Could someone else verify my understanding of the meta tag?

 

Thanks!

 

Ralph

 

Ralph LeVan

Research Scientist

OCLC

 

From: Sandhaus, Evan [mailto:sandhes@nytimes.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2012 11:44 AM
To: Public Vocabs
Subject: Flattening Microdata

 

Hello all!

 

I'm interested in 'flattening' schema.org <http://schema.org/>  object
markup into the <head> element using <meta> elements.  In theory one
should be able to use the "itemref" and "id" attributes to 'flatten' an
object hierarchy into a set of metatags - but in practice this leads to
unexpected results.  

 

For example:

 

Suppose we have a NewsArticle with the headline 'A Test Headline' that
has a creator that is a Person that has the name 'Evan S Sandhaus' and
the url 'http://sandha.us'.  Here is an example of how to flatten that
out in the <head> using id and itemref:

 

<html itemid='the_article_id' itemscope
itemtype='http://schema.org/NewsArticle'>

                <head>

                                <!-- Article properties in global scope
-->

                                <meta itemprop='headline' content='A
Test Headline'/>

                                

                                <!-- Author Properties Flattened with
itemref and ids -->

                                <meta itemprop='creator' itemscope
itemtype='http://schema.org/Person' itemid='the_creator_id'
itemref='author_name author_url'/>

                                <meta id='author_name' itemprop='name'
content='Evan S Sandhaus'/>                              

                                <meta id='author_url' itemprop='url'
content='http://sandha.us' <http://sandha.us'/> / <http://sandha.us'/> >


                </head>

                <body>

                </body>

</html>

 

So that's the theory.

 

In practice, however, both the Rich Snippets Tool and the Python
microdata libraries I'm using locally
(http://pypi.python.org/pypi/microdata) both insist on adding the
creator-specific properties to both the scope of both the creator and
the NewsItem.

 

More concretely - my local tools give me this: 

[{

    "id": "the_article_id",

    "properties": {

        "creator": [{

            "id": "the_creator_id",

            "properties": {

                "name": ["Evan S Sandhaus"],

                "url": ["http://sandha.us <http://sandha.us/> "]

            },

            "type": "http://schema.org/Person"

        }],

        "headline": ["A Test Headline"],

        "name": ["Evan S Sandhaus"],

        "url": ["http://sandha.us <http://sandha.us/> "]

    },

    "type": "http://schema.org/NewsItem"

}]

 

And the Rich Snippets tool gives me this:

Item 

Type: http://schema.org/newsarticle
headline = A Test Headline 
creator = Item( 1 ) 
name = Evan S Sandhaus 
url = http://sandha.us 

Item 1 

Type: http://schema.org/person
name = Evan S Sandhaus 
url = http://sandha.us 

 

So the question is: is this expected behavior?  If so, is there anything
I could do besides this to "flatten" the markup into the <head> element?

 

Thanks!

 

~Evan

--

Evan Sandhaus

Lead Architect, Semantic Platforms

The New York Times Company

@kansandhaus

Received on Wednesday, 8 August 2012 15:58:07 UTC