On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 4:02 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
An initiative by Google, Yahoo and Bing to make a tag language to make things more findable in search engines.
Is there anything in this for us? schema.org tags in templates? Presumably this would require software work too, and require us to cross levels between software and content, at least a little ...
Using schema.org would require $wgAllowMicrodataAttributes to be enabled. We had a long discussion here about this in January 2010:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2010-January/046382.html
The conclusion wound up being (committed by me and OK'd by Tim, no code review comments):
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/61985
""" Disable RDFa/microdata by default
It's not clear we want these as an input format, per wikitech-l discussion. We don't want to allow them if we're not sure, because once we allow them we can't disable them without breaking things. """
Personally, I think schema.org is a good reason to enable microdata and not RDFa by default. All of these formats explicitly support only microdata, not RDFa or microformats. But of course, I thought that's what we should do back in 2010 too, so I'm not going to commit anything unless everyone seems to agree. I'm particularly interested in what Daniel thinks, since he was the one who committed RDFa support.
(Of course, $wgAllowMicrodataAttributes currently only works if $wgHtml5 is true, which it isn't on Wikipedia. That's been discussed here before, and I don't have the time to pursue it, but it really does have to be fixed someday.)
On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 4:44 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
The nice thing is that if it works through microformats, a lot of the Wikipedias' templates already do those. Software massaging may still be needed to make it glitch-free. But having an actual (rather than hypothetical) consumer for the data is a very nice incentive to get it all in order.
It doesn't work through micro*formats*, which is abusing preexisting HTML attributes like title and class to have special meaning. Microformats and RDFa are no longer supported for new schema.org schemas going forward, as the announcement says. It works through micro*data*, which is a new set of attributes devised in the last few years as part of HTML5. Microdata does not work in MediaWiki unless $wgAllowMicrodataAttributes is set to true -- the attributes will be stripped from input, since they're unrecognized. (RDFa is similar to microformats in that way.)