Microdata (HTML)

Microdata is a WHATWG HTML specification used to nest semantics within existing content on web pages.^[1] Search engines, web crawlers, and browsers can extract and process Microdata from a web page and use it to provide a richer browsing experience for users. Search engines benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data because it allows search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide more relevant results to users.^[2][3] Microdata uses a supporting vocabulary to describe an item and name-value pairs to assign values to its properties.^[4] Microdata is an attempt to provide a simpler way of annotating HTML elements with machine-readable tags than the similar approaches of using RDFa and Microformats.

Microdata Vocabularies

Microdata vocabularies provide the semantics, or meaning of an Item. Web developers can design a custom vocabulary or use vocabularies available on the web. A collection of commonly used markup vocabularies are provided by Schema.org schemas which include: Person, Event, Organization, Product, Review, Review-aggregate, Breadcrumb, Offer, Offer-aggregate. Major search engines like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! rely on this markup to improve search results. For some purposes, an ad-hoc vocabulary is adequate. For others, a vocabulary will need to be designed. Where possible, authors are encouraged to re-use existing vocabularies, as this makes content re-use easier.^[1]

Microdata Global Attributes

• itemscope – Creates the Item and indicates that descendants of this element contain information about it.^[1]
• itemtype – A valid URL of a vocabulary that describes the item and its properties context.
• itemid – Indicates a unique identifier of the item.
• itemprop – Indicates that its containing tag holds the value of the specified item property. The properties name and value context are described by the items vocabulary. Properties values usually consist of string values, but can also use URLs using the a element and its href attribute, the img element and its src attribute, or other elements that link to or embed external resources.^[1]
• itemref – Properties that are not descendants of the element with the itemscope attribute can be associated with the item using this attribute. Provides a list of element ids (not itemids) with additional properties elsewhere in the document.^[1]

Example

The following HTML5 markup may be found on a typical about page containing information about a person:

<section> Hello, my name is John Doe, I am a graduate research assistant atthe University of Dreams.My friends call me Johnny. You can visit my homepage at <a href="http://www.JohnnyD.com">www.JohnnyD.com</a>.I live at 1234 Peach Drive, Warner Robins, Georgia.</section>

Here is the same markup with added Microdata:

<section itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"> Hello, my name is <span itemprop="name">John Doe</span>, I am a <span itemprop="jobTitle">graduate research assistant</span> at the <span itemprop="affiliation">University of Dreams</span>. My friends call me <span itemprop="additionalName">Johnny</span>. You can visit my homepage at <a href="http://www.JohnnyD.com" itemprop="url">www.JohnnyD.com</a>. <section itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress"> I live at <span itemprop="streetAddress">1234 Peach Drive</span>, <span itemprop="addressLocality">Warner Robins</span>, <span itemprop="addressRegion">Georgia</span>. </section></section>

As the above example shows, Microdata items can be nested. In this case an item of type http://schema.org/Address is nested inside an item of type http://schema.org/Person.

The following text shows how Google parses the Microdata from the above example code. Developers can test pages containing Microdata using Google's Rich Snippet Testing Tool.^[5]

Item   Type: http://schema.org/Person   name = John Doe   jobTitle = graduate research assistant   affiliation = University of Dreams   additionalName = Johnny   url = http://www.johnnyd.com/   address = Item(1)Item 1   Type: http://schema.org/PostalAddress   streetAddress = 1234 Peach Drive   addressLocality = Warner Robins   addressRegion = Georgia

Support

• Servers: Google can^[6] use microdata in its result pages.^[5]
• Browsers: As of 2012^[update], notable browsers that added support for the Microdata DOM API, are :^[7]

• Libraries: MicrodataJS^[8] is a JavaScript library and jQuery plugin that emulates the DOM API.

See also

• RDFa
• Semantic web
• hCalendar
• Semantic HTML
• Plain Old Semantic HTML

References

External links

• Microdata — HTML5 Draft Standard, WHATWG 
• Usability testing HTML5, 2009-10-04 , about how some of the design decisions for microdata were made
• Almaer, Dion (2009-05-11), Hixie discusses the addition of HTML5 “microdata”, Ajaxian 
• HTML5 Microdata Specs, Data-Vocabulary.org 
• GetSchema Annotating HTML5 with Schema.org and Microdata. An Example Wiki.
• Live Microdata, a tool to interactively edit and extract the Microdata embedded in HTML
• Microdata generator, Web based Microdata rich snippet generator