Re: Breadcrumbs proposal

My two cents on this is that the data-vocabulary.org model - where
Breadcrumb is represented as a type rather than a property - is, in the
grand scheme of things, relatively light markup for the amount of precision
one is able to encode (namely the ability to differentiate the breadcrumb
title from its URL, and the ability to declare multiple breadcrumb paths on
the same page).

Accordingly, I would certainly favor explicit breadcrumb property
declarations over a broad declaration of a "markup area that contains
breadcrumbs."  Relying on consumers to parse such markup meaningfully is,
in my opinion, obviating one of the one key benefits of structured data
markup - namely reducing the amount of guesswork required of parsers (or,
depending how you look at, limiting the likely different interpretations of
code by different parsers) .

Example data-vocabulary.org code from the Google Webmaster Tools article on
breadcrumbs [1]:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Breadcrumb">
  <a href="http://www.example.com/dresses" itemprop="url">
    <span itemprop="title">Dresses</span>
  </a> ›
</div>
<div itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Breadcrumb">
  <a href="http://www.example.com/dresses/real" itemprop="url">
    <span itemprop="title">Real Dresses</span>
  </a> ›
</div>
<div itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Breadcrumb">
  <a href="http://www.example.com/clothes/dresses/real/green"
itemprop="url">
    <span itemprop="title">Real Green Dresses</span>
  </a>
</div>

[1] http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=185417




On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 3:41 PM, Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org> wrote:

> On 10 June 2013 21:47, Jarno van Driel <jarno@quantumspork.nl> wrote:
> > Can anybody tell me whatever happened to the Breadcrumb proposal
> > (http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/Breadcrumbs)?
> >
> > Isn't it about time something is done about the current state of the
> > schema.org breadcrumb property? It seems crazy to me to keep
> > suggesting to add new items to schema.org if we can't fix what's
> > already there - It's getting tiresome to keep falling back to the
> > data-vocabulary.org breadcrumb because the schema.org version has been
> > put on ice.
>
> Very fair question. Here's the core of the problem as I understand it:
>
> * The markup requirement is roughly that consumers want: i) an ordered
> list ii) of anchor URL / text pairs.
> * Representing this explicitly in Microdata + RDFa is quite heavy
> markup (esp RDFa whose output is formally unordered)
> * An alternate design would be simply to indicate the markup area that
> contains breadcrumbs and acknowledge that consumers will re-parse this
> * Doing so would work differently in RDFa and Microdata, since the
> value of a Microdata property is never structured markup.
>
> I don't think these are insurmountable problems, and agree that we
> should get this moving again. There's a lot of breadcrumb markup out
> there...
>
> Dan
>
>