Re: makesOffer should accept Service

On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 11:43 AM, Jarno van Driel <jarno@quantumspork.nl>wrote:

> Somebody asked me yesterday why itemtype="http://schema.org/Product
> http://schema.org/Service"> has to be marked up this way just to be able
> to add an offer/Offer. He proposed to mark it up like itemtype="
> http://schema.org/Offer http://schema.org/Service">. Adding the Offer as
> a second type of Service and thus skipping Product all together.
>
> In all honesty I couldn't come up with a reason why this would be a wrong
> notation. So I was curious, does anybody think this is valid markup and if
> not, why not?
>

My interpretation is that you would describing something that is both an
Offer and a Service--which is subtly but significantly different from
describing something that is an Offer to provide a Service. The question
"What is being offered?" is answered by the itemOffered property, which
links an Offer to a Product. In the proposed markup, there's nothing for
that property to point at, so a consumer of the markup would likely
consider it a dead end.

Of course, given enough encounters with this markup in the wild and/or a
large enough customer insisting on the importance of this markup, it's
possible that schema.org consumers would make a special case when they
parse multi-typed items that include Offer as one of the types.