Re: Expected type(s) for email should include URL

Thanks for the clarification Cosmin (that's what I thought - my image
example was a preemptive foil to the possible argument that the <a> anchor
was the de facto text in question).  All the more reason why an allowed
expected type for email should be URL.

One CAN find a schema.org example of the email property used with the
correct expected type for Organization [1]:

E-mail: <span itemprop="email">secretariat(at)google.org</span>

Which is almost like saying you *don't* want to display an email address in
a manner that a data consumer will understand its an email address, use
this property ... which of course will indicate to a data consumer that
it's an email address.  Structured data markup for data whose structure you
don't want to expose? :)

[1] http://schema.org/Organization


On Mon, Jul 29, 2013 at 2:48 PM, Cosmin Paun <cpaun88@gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Aaron,
>
> According to [1], if the element is an <a></a> element,
>
> "The value is the absolute URL that results from resolving the value
> of the element's href attribute relative to the element at the time
> the attribute is set, or the empty string if there is no such
> attribute or if resolving it results in an error."
>
> For a microdata extractor,
>
> <a href="mailto:jane-doe@xyz.edu" itemprop="email">jane-doe@xyz.edu</a>
>
> is the same with
>
> <a href="mailto:jane-doe@xyz.edu" itemprop="email"><img
> src="gigantic-email-me-now-
> button.jpg"></a>
>
> because the value extracted is the value of the href attribute.
>
> Regards,
>
> Cosmin
>
> [1]
> http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/microdata.html#values
>
> On Mon, Jul 29, 2013 at 10:37 PM, Aaron Bradley <aaranged@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > The expected type for the property "email" [1], used on the types
> > Organization, Person and ContactPoint, is text.
> >
> > However, an email address is as often as not expressed as a mailto:address.
> > And, in fact, almost all of the schema.org microdata examples that
> include
> > this property express it as a URL, such as this example for Person [2]:
> >
> > <a href="mailto:jane-doe@xyz.edu" itemprop="email">jane-doe@xyz.edu</a>
> >
> > Google's Structured Data Testing Tool [3] does not complain if the Person
> > example is run through it, but Google's Schema Validator [4] returns this
> > warning - as it should, as per the spec:
> >
> > The property http://schema.org/email expects a value of type Text
> >
> > Note that it's perfectly possible for a page to legitimately use
> something
> > other than text for the hyperlink anchor:
> >
> > <a href="mailto:jane-doe@xyz.edu" itemprop="email"><img
> > src="gigantic-email-me-now-button.jpg"></a>
> >
> > Given this, doesn't it make sense to have the expected types for email
> to be
> > set to "Text or URL", as with (for example) the property "menu"?
> >
> > [1] http://schema.org/email
> > [2] http://scheam.org/Person
> > [3] http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
> > [4] https://developers.google.com/gmail/schemas/testing-your-schema
> > [5] http://schema.org/menu
> >
>