Schema.org Needs to Have a Heart to Heart Talk With W3C

"Can't we all just get along?" -Rodney King

I wrote about the new Schema.org guidelines here, in an article that I referenced from SearchEngineWatch.

Overall I love the idea of using microdata so that search engines can more easily tell what your content is about.  Using the correct tags to identify information on your web pages creates a more robust search experience for the end user of the search engine.  Frankly, this is long overdue, just try to find relevant data on your average search query, it's sometimes a garbled mess.  Bing's television commercials accurately represent runaway querys.

With this in mind I coded a few simple things on our homepage to be Schema.org friendly.  I figured that a simple thing like inserting address, postal code and phone number microdata would be a great place to start.

Overall it was relatively easy to do but in the future I hope that somone creates a Joomla! (and Wordpress) plugin that will make our lives easier.

After correctly formatting and inserting the code I figured that I would do a quick test using the HTML validator over at W3C.

Listen, I get that NOT EVERYONE is as anal with W3C compliance as I am, but the thing that struck me (after finding 5 errors on the page) was the errors on the page are directly attributed to the microdata that Schema.org is asking for.

Here's one of the errors that I'm getting:

"itemscope" is not a member of a group specified for any attribute

This represents a problem in the webmaster community, often folks come up with great ideas and they don't take time to address the appropriate people regarding compliance issues.

Being W3C compliant is not really a badge of honor, it's just something that I believe in so that screen readers and visually impaired folks can easily read or listen to what we put online.  Sometimes it's a hassle but overall if I can make someones live better, why not make the effort and do the extra work?

Sometimes it's like herding cats when you try to get things done...