Re: Why no "Website" type under schema.org/CreativeWork?

+1 Concur.  We need it.


On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 7:22 PM, Jason Douglas <jasondouglas@google.com>wrote:

> I think we do need a WebSite class.  IMO, its absence was an oversight.
>
>
> On Thu Mar 20 2014 at 5:05:28 PM, Aaron Bradley <aaranged@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> In Pinterest documention on Rich Pins [1] one finds this recommendation
>> (and variations on it):
>>
>> "We suggest that you also include your site name using an Open Graph
>> og:site_name tag. Schema.org doesn't support a site name field."
>>
>> This is indeed true.
>>
>> Perhaps this item type was considered unnecessary because of a view that
>> a "website" is simply the top-level URL for any Thing.
>>
>> But as a creative work a website is not a URL, but a collection of URLs -
>> just as the creative work that is a book is not a page, but a collection of
>> pages.  And while such a type might engender confusion with other resource
>> types with which it is associated, like WebPage, websites obviously exist
>> as actual things out there in the world.  Just as a Book, or Photograph, or
>> Movie may be referred to representationally in web content, so are websites.
>>
>> And while a website could also be thought of as the URL (as in the "url"
>> property) of an organization (as in the "Organization" item type), a
>> website can on one hand have more than owner, and the other hand an
>> organization can own more than one website - each with its own URL, name,
>> etc.
>>
>> E.g., two Microsoft websites:
>>
>> url:  http://support.microsoft.com/
>> name:  Microsoft Support
>>
>> url:  http://careers.microsoft.com/
>> name:  Microsoft Careers
>>
>> In terms of the sort of site name declaration to which Pinterest makes
>> reference (a ready-made use case for the utility of a website item type)
>> Open Graph - with its <meta> tag declaration method - is obviously not
>> constrained by schema.org's stricture that "you should mark up only the
>> content that is visible to people who visit the web page." [2]
>>
>> However, virtually every website ever constructed has a "home" link
>> anchored either on text or an image which already declares the website URL,
>> with the website name at least strongly implied.  It wouldn't seem like
>> much of stretch to declare a website name here with a <meta> tag.
>>
>> Image link, without schema.org markup:
>> <a href="http://example.com"><img src="/example-logo.png"
>> alt="Example"></a>
>>
>> Image link, without schema.org/Website markup:
>> <span itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Website">
>> <a href="http://example.com" itemprop="url"><img src="/example-logo.png"
>> alt="Example" itemprop="image"></a>
>> <meta itemprop="name" content="Example">
>> </div>
>>
>> Such usage would, I think, fall squarely into the realm schema.org's
>> allowance for "missing/implicit information", where "a web page has
>> information that would be valuable to mark up, but the information can't be
>> marked up because of the way it appears on the page." [3]
>>
>> I keep think I'm overlooking some principle that would preclude website
>> from being included in the CreativeWork schema, but I can't think of what
>> that principle would be.
>>
>> [1] https://developers.pinterest.com/rich_pins/
>> [2] http://schema.org/docs/gs.html#schemaorg_expected
>> [3] http://schema.org/docs/gs.html#advanced_missing
>>
>


-- 
-Thad
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