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Schema.org — Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! Agree On Markup Vocabulary

Posted by Soulskill on from the executive-decision dept.

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."

4 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. Not to worry... by SwedishChef · · Score: 5, Funny

    Microsoft will break this one, too.

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    1. Re:Not to worry... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The proposal is itself breaking html. This time, Google and Yahoo are in with the "extending". The vague promise of better search positions will drive web developers to completely muck up their html output. There is no reason not to re-use the Dublin Core.

  2. How is this different than the MetaData tag? by jader3rd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Dammit by Sloppy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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