Re: www.schema.org should redirect to schema.org

Were one to canonicalize schema.org URLs so that the www form redirected
(presumably with a 301) to the non-www form (which I certainly endorse), I
would also recommend redirecting variant casing for types to the canonical
form for that type.  In fact, the consequences of using a variant case are
more dire than that of using www.schema.org instead of schema.org:  in the
case of the latter de facto duplicate content is produced; in the case of
the former the URL does not resolve at all.

For example, this is the correct casing for type type "article," and used
in the URL it resolves with a 200:
  http://schema.org/Article

However, if this returns a 404:
  http://schema.org/article

A little ironically - at least in the Google content - the Structured Data
Testing Tool returns this in the "Extracted structure data" section when a
URL or direct input declares the itemtype to be schema.org/Article:
type:  http://schema.org/article
... which is, as per above, an invalid URL. :)

While the casing conventions for schema.org types and properties are
well-documented and should be respected, is there any reason why having
variant cases resolve (or, ideally, redirect to the canonical case form)
would be problematic?

Finally, were we to follow standard SEO practices for URL canonicalization,
folder-level URLs (i.e., all schema.org type URLs) would resolve to the
canonical form - either with or without a trailing slash.  The canonical
for a schema.org type URL is obviously without a trailing slash; but if you
were to request this:
  http://schema.org/Article/
... it would not (301) redirect to:
  http://schema.org/Article
... but instead - like:
  http://schema.org/article
it would return a 404.

On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 7:04 AM, Stéphane Corlosquet
<scorlosquet@gmail.com>wrote:

> I've noticed some folks using "www." in their schema.org urls for types,
> for example http://www.schema.org/Event. It's good SEO practice to avoid
> duplicate web pages, but this rule also applies to vocabularies where we
> try to get as many people using the exact same types and properties.
>
> A few examples:
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2012Sep/0040.html
>
> http://www.webdatacommons.org/2012-08/stats/top_classes_for_extractor_html-microdata.html
>
> https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/webmasters/r6IhYVO_iwc/0H7-i7KY2fYJ
>
> Would it be possible to redirect http://www.schema.org/* urls to their
> non-www equivalent http://schema.org/* so at least people copy/pasting
> type urls from their browser won't get the wrong urls?
>
> --
> Steph.
>