Schema.org Options

[Christian J]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema.org

I haven't paid attention to this before, but now I noticed that W3C uses attributes like ITEMSCOPE, ITEMTYPE and ITEMPROP in code examples, even though these attributes are not part of the HTML5 spec.

Apparently these schemas are meant to help search engines. http://schema.org/docs/gs.html#microdata_itemprop even suggests using the semantically meaningless SPAN element as a container for their ITEMPROP attribute:

"Note that we have added additional <span>...</span> tags to attach the itemprop attributes to the appropriate text on the page. <span> tags don't change the way pages are rendered by a web browser, so they are a convenient HTML element to use with itemprop."

Questions:

1. How can this not be abused by spammers?

2. Many web authors already abuse DIV and SPAN instead of semantic markup. Won't this get even worse now, resulting in sites marked up of nothing but SPAN elements and lots of ITEMPROP attributes? After all most webmasters care more about search engine results than accessibility.

[Christian J]

I made a BUMP-move of my own thread.

Does nobody have any opinions on this web authoring subject?

[pandy]

No.