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| title | date | syndicatedCopies | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Why I choose Microdata | 2024-12-14T00:34:50-05:00 |
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The four most popular ways to use RDF-based metadata on websites are RDFa-Core, RDFa-Lite, Microdata, and inline JSON-LD.
I can't use RDFa-Lite because I need rel HTML attributes. rel silently upgrades RDFa-Lite to RDFa-Core, which parses differently. I doubt all parsers upgrade correctly; some will try to parse RDFa-Core as RDFa-Lite. Conformant RDFa parsers upgrade RDFa-Lite pages to RDFa-Core despite many authors only being familiar with RDFa-Lite. I suppose resources like Schema.org and Google's documentation only documenting RDFa-Lite markup worsens the confusion.
With RDFa split between two incompatible alternatives with a confusing upgrade mechanism, the alternatives are Microdata and JSON-LD. I use structured data extensively; JSON-LD would duplicate most of the page. Let's use [this relatively short article]({{<relref "/posts/google-document-warehouse-api-docs-leak/">}}) as an example. Exruct can convert the embedded Microdata into a massive JSON document featuring JSON-LD. Take a look at the JSON-LD and HTML side by side. Microdata attributes take a fraction of the footprint, encode the same information, and don't require duplicating nearly the entire page.