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Schema.org — Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! Agree On Markup Vocabulary
aabelro writes "Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! have decided to propose a common markup vocabulary, Schema.org, based on the Microdata format, simplifying the job of webmasters who want to give meaning to their web pages' content."
Manu Sporny, chair of the W3C group that created RDFa, added his (personal) dissenting opinion about Schema, calling it a 'false choice,' and saying, "The entire Web community should decide which features should be supported – not just Microsoft or Google or Yahoo."
WAAAHHH!!!! The W3C didn't make up this standard!!! We're still debating what the dickens to define as HTML5!
No fair that the other children are running off with their ball to do their own thing...
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Microsoft will break this one, too.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Like always happens with standardization efforts, the only way to make your offering unique from the competitors' is to add custom functionality not found within said standard.
Maybe the W3C can come up with another form of HTML.
They seem to enjoy coming up with poorly thought out half-standards that invite browser incompatability.
They can top it off by excluding obviously necessary features, inviting companies to come up with various incompatible implementations of basic functionality, like flash movie and music players.
Right. You've got to include Facebook.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
One of the reasons why Google was able to tromp AltaVista was that AltaVista's search was based completley on the MetaData tag of the html page, and Google ignored the MetaData tag. The reason why? Website administrator were putting false information into the MetaData tag in hopes of generating more web crawler search hits. Google decided to go off of what was actually being presetned on the page, and we all found that to be more useful.
I'm actually ok with google deciding things. they have motives OTHER than profit sometimes. And generally do an ok job of things.
microsoft on the other hand... hahahahahahahahahahaha.. they don't get to decide shit. we tried that before. they fuckup everything they touch.
and yahoo? do they even exist anymore? why? are we supposed to still pretend that yahoo is relevant? They're not.
It really is of no use if the person browsing the site doesn't use it. Seems like browser developers should be an important part of this equation. Google = Chrome, MS = IE....so where does Mozilla stand?
I, for one, welcome our new mark-up vocabulary overlords.
Microsoft or Google or Yahoo oh my!
I am a whore and have to do whatever the big guys say, because I want their traffic. Ok, so I admit it.
But dammit, did it have to be microdata? I already mark up with microformat classes and RDFa (both the sortof standardized namespaces and Google's) and Google was handling it pretty well, and every once in a while it looked like Yahoo grokked it too. Microdata was the ugly stepchild third choice, the least well-supported one, with the fewest number of parsers out there in the wild.. So I left that one out, because nobody cared. Now it's going to be The One?
I have better things to do than add Yet Another fucking attribute to my generated HTML which is already bloated with otherwise unnecessary classes and properties and typeofs. Now I'm going to have itemscope and itemtype attributes too, huh? Just how many characters long can we make each element become, just so that everything can make sense of it? Fuck you guys. No seriously, fuck you. Yes, I'm going to do it anyway, but even so, fuck you.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
So why's Apple not part of this?
Bet they decided to go their own way, play solo as usual...
The bad Apples get kicked out of the barrel anyway! (LOL Haha!! I can't believe I came up with this!)
Not really all that remarkable. The main progress comes from the whole WhatWG efforts which in turn is basically the major browser makers saying "Screw you moving-like-molasses people and your incompatible XHTML 2.0, we'll just do things the way we agree to do them and everybody else can follow along or stay behind."
Same story here, except now it's not the major browser makers, but the major search engine companies - who want to be able to more easily index information. Why wait for what webmasters and users want, when your search engine(s) pretty much control the market and the webmaster really has little choice but to either follow along or stay behind?
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as long as they all get along and the things introduced aren't wonderful in principle but a nightmare in practice (frames, anyone?)
Note that the system used is very much in line with HTML5 veering well away from the XHTML 2.0 changes, in that rather than introducing new elements that a browser or other parser could easily choke on, it introduces new properties which are easily ignored.
I say 'be careful with Microsoft' because if my memory serves me well, Microsoft had some agreement with now defunct SUN Microsystems over Java and its use...that was until SUN realized that Microsoft had a hidden agenda.
Nothing will prevent Microsoft from attempting to pull off what I will call a 'SUN moment.'
I'm sure the W3C format was useful in every way except the one that counted.
If Google, Yahoo, and MS can agree on a format, it means it was a moneymaker.
First and foremost, the problem with any such standard is its limited scope and dated features. For example, a breadcrumb may not be around in 1 year or 3 years because its use is not longer desirable or needed or better more efficient navigation models are created. So the spec, by default (just like HTML 5) is technically obsolete before it is ever even ratified.
Second, holy micro management batman. Sure it will help search engines in theory. In reality I can use it to mold search results to an even greater degree. It just makes the nonsense that already is SEO even worse. Reviews get higher weight (as an example), so my blog now becomes full of "reviews" though they are really just rants. Or "offers" or anything else I can claim my content to be. Plus inlining the schemas is just plain annoying. And will any of this pass markup validation? To me this is just lazy by the search engines. Their results have been getting worse because they rely too much on social BS. Now you are going to rely on me telling you the truth? Fat chance of that if I can game the system for higher rankings. It is as bad as relying on what people voted to provide relevant results. It will not change the fact that searching for terms will have a blog that links to a blog that links to a blog that links to facebook that links to twitter that links to the actual article. But hey, that is not important right, let's add annotations and long more useless markup. Yay progress.
Maybe just maybe if we killed HTML dead like it truly deserves and create a useful markup language from the ground up we can get useful results. Maybe if you allow and account for unique features on a browser by browser basis and have graceful degradation built into the browsers themselves. But you know that will never happen. So let's add more markup, semantics, annotations, and why not bibliographies?
Microsoft AND Google AND Yahoo.
Terms of service
This is a contract between you and each of the sponsors of Schema.org: Google, Inc., Yahoo, Inc., and Microsoft Corporation (referred to collectively in this agreement as the "Sponsors", "we" or "us"). By using the Schema.org website (the "Website") you agree to be bound by the following terms and conditions (the "Terms of Service").
Changes in Website and Terms and Conditions; Change in Schema
We may modify or terminate the Website, for any reason, and without notice. We also reserve the right to modify these Terms of Service from time to time without notice, and you expressly agree to be bound by such modifications when posted on the Website.
This legalese basically says: By using the schema.org website, (esp. their schemas) you agree to whatever we want forever. THE END.
Even Facebook's horrid TOS agreement is better for you than this, at least you can terminate Facebook's agreement.
I for one rebel against our Gigantic Corporate Lawyer-wielding privacy-and-competition-hating overlords. If I can't get past the TOS page, I'll just stick to RDFa. Just added "0.0.0.0 schema.org" to my hosts file just in case I get link-baited into agreeing to that evil evil evil TOS.
At least now we'll have a consistent way of marking up dry cleaning and volcanoes.
Is this term actually still being used?
i'm sure microsoft will do! KVM Switch
I wish that I had bought the domain name :/
A big part of his complaint is that RDFa scales better than Microdata which is what Schema.org uses, so both should be supported. Microdata is part of HTML5, and is an extension of Microforms, created exactly because RDFa is considered too complex.
This is exactly a case of WhatWG producing workable standards and W3C creating design by committee monstrosities.
Brilliant idea, then quality decisions will be made, just like in our political system.
Can someone explain to me why there is a need for a separate metadata vocabulary?
Wasn't this the issue that XML, XSD, XSLT and XSLT-FO supposed to address? Document verbiage aside, don't these families adequately cover the issue of structure, and semantics?
If the issue is to teach the browser/search engine, the document semantics -- can't they (MS,Yahoo,Google) actually parse XML for common dictionary words and build semantics themselves? Why make humans do all the tedious annotations? They can probably publish standard XSD for people to structure XMLs... no?
no matter what standards group or collection of companies agree on any given standard. volume wins in the end.
sounds like a Fascist to me
I hate to say this but when you have Bing, Google, and Yahoo saying that if I clean the dishes, use microdata, I can get laid in a search engine sense, I'm sorry the dishes will be cleaned. I don't know if this is live but let's be honest, they have us by our proverbial search engine balls. The days of free and fair elections, I mean fair SEO are as dead as Rep. Weiner's political career. Do you realize that he never had sex with any of those women. I'm not sure about you but if I'm going to ruin my career and my marriage, I'm going to at the very least factor the equation, define PI until I pass out, prove that (a)ss + (b)reasts = c
Couldn't get the superscripts to work.
I hope the companies would just put their efforts in creating a semantic web, instead of trying to hack-patch html by adding random meta-data for the purpose of search. Seriously.. focus people!
Focus!
The last person to mod me down is a rotten egg..... there.. that should do it..
...they change the schema? I can't see any version numbers in the tags so how do the search engines know which version of the schema you mean, or will they continue supporting every version of every schema forever? Or will we all have to edit all our webpages in vi every time they bring out a new schema version to keep all our tags up to date?
Korma: Good
Is if amazon, walmart and ebay decided to come up with a common tagging system for shopping searches.
This does not change how web page are displayed only how they are tagged for search engines.
Having the top 3 search engines in the world come to a common agreement is not a bad thing.
These three search engines have represented 95%+ of the search engine market for the last 5 years.
When 95% of the market decides on a common standard that is THE standard regardless of any hand waving
by the "de jure" standards body
This is a blatant admission of the failure to indexing content. Reliance on the honest representation of the content by providers is doomed.
You are not the "entire web community". You seem to have not realised this last time, when everyone implemented the WHATWG's HTML standard instead of your XHTML 2.0 pet project. Please get relevant or get bent.
I just spent few mins looking at schema.org and their proposed schema. The way, I look at it, they are just extending existing HTML tags (in spirit of, everything is XML eventually), so that they can extract meaningful information from HTML tag. Of course, it will help their spiders and search processors, but in end, it will help average web user, who will get exact results.
Take a example of typical e-commerce site. These days, those sites have jump through hoops on "regular" basis, to provide product feed to google/bing/yahoo or any shopping comparison site. And almost everyone wants to do it, to get more page hits, more visibility. Now, if under plan of schema.org proposed extensions, spiders can parse their actual html pages and index product information, along with "latest" price. Hence no need to feeds and consumer always see prices on google products, as it is actually on retailer website.
This same concept can be applied on different scenarios like emergency updates, latest news as it happens, any kind of status updates.
Google has already starting showing flight times on their search. (i guess, largely due to fact, they got ITA) but using schema.org, they can show more relevant information for other text.
Theoretically, companies like google or any other one, can build whole new genre of webapps.
HTML and CSS are used as a presentation markup language. Adding "meaning" to those is approaching it backward. First, mark up the document / data, using XML or RDF (for this argument the preference doesn't necessarily matter). Then, use XSLT to provide a transform into the presentation language of your choice. I guess we could argue that XHTML _is_ XML at its core, though, so adding attributes to add "meaning" might be doing what I said, anyway. As far as 'why are the big companies agreeing to this, why isn't everyone consulted?' argument - hey, at least we're making progress. If one large group of pages is marked up in a standard way, then that's a lot of "meaning" that can suddenly be extracted and used in our apps / widgets / mashups / things-to-be-named-later-when-someone-thinks-them-up. In that sense, I'm all for it; let's get started! There's also a mechanical precedent for this: think back to when the auto industry in the US decided to standardize the "markup" of wheels with a 5-bolt lug nut pattern, spaced the same way - suddenly wheels were interchangeable, and making special chromed add-ons for people was economically more feasible too. They didn't consult a body of international automobile enthusiasts - Ford, GM, and Chrysler pretty much drove that one.
Perhaps the entire community should embrace and extend the schema ;-) Would look good on M$
Manu Sporny, [...] (said), "The entire Web community should decide which features should be supported – not just Microsoft or Google or Yahoo."
So just who is the entire Web community? It certainly isn't W3C, who effectively bar individuals and SME's with their $8000 annual membership fees.
The corporations are only interested in establishing or brokering leverage.
The IETF isn't the easiest means of establishing support for a feature, and not many of us have read all 6000 odd RFCs anyhow.
So, basically, who cares what schema org says, or Manu Sporny for that matter?
Since when has anyone been able to make a change to the status quo?
This comment was written with the intention to opt out of advertising.
This is their next big idea? Seriously, do these guys just sit around all day and think "how can we make the life of the developer even more complicated and confusing?".
:T:R:A:N:S:
Why is it that Video Games are still not considered as a major source of media? Looking at the full list schema page there is no mention of a video game, even though the industry is larger than the music industry when it comes to revenue and sales. Yet music has many different new tags. Curse you evil big corps!
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