DZone
Thanks for visiting DZone today,
Edit Profile
  • Manage Email Subscriptions
  • How to Post to DZone
  • Article Submission Guidelines
Sign Out View Profile
  • Post an Article
  • Manage My Drafts
Over 2 million developers have joined DZone.
Log In / Join
Refcards Trend Reports Events Over 2 million developers have joined DZone. Join Today! Thanks for visiting DZone today,
Edit Profile Manage Email Subscriptions Moderation Admin Console How to Post to DZone Article Submission Guidelines
View Profile
Sign Out
Refcards
Trend Reports
Events
Zones
Culture and Methodologies Agile Career Development Methodologies Team Management
Data Engineering AI/ML Big Data Data Databases IoT
Software Design and Architecture Cloud Architecture Containers Integration Microservices Performance Security
Coding Frameworks Java JavaScript Languages Tools
Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance Deployment DevOps and CI/CD Maintenance Monitoring and Observability Testing, Tools, and Frameworks
Partner Zones AWS Cloud
by AWS Developer Relations
Culture and Methodologies
Agile Career Development Methodologies Team Management
Data Engineering
AI/ML Big Data Data Databases IoT
Software Design and Architecture
Cloud Architecture Containers Integration Microservices Performance Security
Coding
Frameworks Java JavaScript Languages Tools
Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance
Deployment DevOps and CI/CD Maintenance Monitoring and Observability Testing, Tools, and Frameworks
Partner Zones
AWS Cloud
by AWS Developer Relations

schema.org: Now Supporting RDFa 1.1 (Lite)

John Esposito user avatar by
John Esposito
·
Nov. 14, 11 · Interview
Like (0)
Save
Tweet
Share
4.44K Views

Join the DZone community and get the full member experience.

Join For Free

Build the semantic web, certainly -- but using which standard?

For practical reasons, schema.org is an excellent choice: it simply works with the major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex). But at first schema.org supported only one semantic markup style (microdata) -- relatively easy to use, but, in some people's opinion, not as powerful as RDFa.

That limitation is now disappearing. In an official schema.org blogpost on Friday, Dan Brickley announced that schema.org will now be adopting a simplified form of RDFa:

As a result of our continued discussions and collaborations with publishers, implementers and standards-makers, we're pleased to give advance notice of a new way of adopting schema.org's structured data vocabulary. W3C's RDF Web Applications group are right now putting the finishing touches to the latest version of the RDFa standard. This work opens up new possibilities also for developers who intend to work with schema.org data using RDF-based tools and Linked Data, and defines a simplified publisher-friendly 'Lite' view of RDFa...We hope that our support for 'RDFa Lite', alongside Microdata, will allow publishers to focus more on what they want to say with their data, rather than on the details of its specific encoding as markup.


RDFa 1.1 Lite is pretty new itself -- Ben Adida first proposed it in late September. If you aren't familiar with the 'Lite' version (I wasn't), watch Ben's presentation or, more briefly, read semanticweb.com's summary -- the short version of which is:

 

RDFa 1.1 Lite is a simple subset of RDFa consisting of the following attributes: vocab, typeof, property, rel, about and prefix.


Caveat developer, however: the RDFa 1.1 Lite format schema.org just promised to support is based on the current working W3C draft, but the latest editors' draft has already introduced some significant changes, which are slated to enter the 'working' document fairly soon. As Ivan Herman said on the W3C blog:

The most important new feature, as far as the Schema.org examples also goes, is the changed behavior of the @property attribute: in the overwhelming percentage of the RDFa usage, it becomes synonymous to @rel. (What essentially happens is that, in the presence of, say, an @href attribute, the value of that attribute is bound to @property instead of a possible literal.)


Caveats aside, integrating RDFa (in some form or another) on schema.org definitely sounds like a good thing -- one more semantic web developer's worry fading away.

 

Schema.org

Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.

Popular on DZone

  • Choosing the Right Framework for Your Project
  • 10 Most Popular Frameworks for Building RESTful APIs
  • Software Maintenance Models
  • LazyPredict: A Utilitarian Python Library to Shortlist the Best ML Models for a Given Use Case

Comments

Partner Resources

X

ABOUT US

  • About DZone
  • Send feedback
  • Careers
  • Sitemap

ADVERTISE

  • Advertise with DZone

CONTRIBUTE ON DZONE

  • Article Submission Guidelines
  • Become a Contributor
  • Visit the Writers' Zone

LEGAL

  • Terms of Service
  • Privacy Policy

CONTACT US

  • 600 Park Offices Drive
  • Suite 300
  • Durham, NC 27709
  • support@dzone.com
  • +1 (919) 678-0300

Let's be friends: