I'm trying to learn how Microdata works and I was looking at the Schema.org website and I kinda get how the basics works because you can find some outlined examples online of the Navigations, Headers, Sidebars and Footers - but I don't understand what properties you can use with more complex item types.
Let's say I have an About page on my site.
Nothing fancy, you just talk about your business but there is a item type http://schema.org/AboutPage you can use.
So I visit that link but to be honest everything you see at that page isn't really written down for beginners I think.
Am I allowed to use all the item properties listed on that specific page or only the the selected few in the Thing section at the bottom of the page because the above two sections are part of WebPage and CreativeWork? I don't have the CreativeWork item type on my page, just the WebPage attached to my HTML body tag.
I always thought you could use those item types as snippets in your HTML to wrap pieces of HTML content together and you didn't need to work with an inherited workflow. Going from wrapped content inside WebPage → CreativeWork → AboutPage item types.
How to find the items types and which properties you can use within them?
First note, you can’t use the vocabulary Schema.org with Microformats. You probably confused it with Microdata, which is one of three syntaxes the Schema.org partners support (the other two are JSON-LD and RDFa). (I edited your question accordingly.)
You may use all properties that are listed on a type’s page.
A type in Schema.org always inherits from all its parent types, up to Thing. So, for example, the type AboutPage is also a WebPage, which is also a CreativeWork, which is also a Thing. You just have to use the most specific type that applies in your case.
For finding appropriate types, simply start at Thing and check the "More specific Types", linked on that page. And repeat.
Another way would be to search for some related keywords on the list of all types and check if a suitable type exists.
The problem is if you're unfamiliar with XML and Schemas because schema.org is as friendly as they can be without actually giving more examples of it, simply because stuff like this is indeed complex to make generic enough to reuse, while verbose enough to explain.
However there are some Google tools which can help you learn:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-helper
https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/
And register for Google Webmaster Tools account, and use their data highlighter and test.
Use that in combination with the schema.org examples and definitions, and then you'll properly relatively fast start learning which tags to use and how to nest them.
Related
I have a Web Site where at the bottom I show the most searched keywords in the site. This keyword are all physical locations.
You know if there is a schema on Schema.org vocabulary for add meaning to this items?
If the keywords are linked, each of the linked pages could be a SearchResultsPage.
For the links to these pages:
WebPage defines the property relatedLink, but it’s questionable if the top search phrases are really related to each of your web pages (I’d say they are not). And note this property expects a URL, not a WebPage (or SearchResultsPage) item.
Apart from relatedLink, there doesn’t seem to be a property that would be suitable for referencing (links to) top search phrases.
If you want to mark it up as some kind of list, you could use ItemList (I’d only go this way if you think the list is important). Note that you can’t use relatedLink in combination with that.
tl;dr: Use SearchResultsPage for the search result pages. Leave the footer links to these search result pages alone.
I get the following errors from the Google Rich Snippet Tool for my website http://iancrowther.co.uk/
hcard
Warning: This information will not appear as a rich snippet in search results results, because it seems to describe an organization. Google does not currently display organization information in rich snippets
Warning: At least one field must be set for Hcard.
Warning: Missing required field "name (fn)".
Im experimenting with vcard and Schema.org and am wondering if I'm missing something or the validator is playing up. I have added vcard and Schema.org markup to the body which may be causing confusion. Also, I am making the assumption I can use both methods to markup my code.
Update:
I guess with the body tag, I'm just trying to let Google discover the elements which make up the schema object within the page. I'm not sure if this is a good / bad way to approach things? However it lets my markup be free of specific blocks of markup. I guess this is open to discussion but I like the idea of having a natural flow to the content that's decorated in the background. Do you think there is any negative impact? I'm undecided.
I am in favour of the Person structure, this was a good call as this is more representative of the current site content. I am a freelance developer and as such use this page as my Organisation landing page, so I guess I have to make a stronger decision of the sites goals and tailor the content accordingly, ie Organisation or Person.
I understand that there is no immediate rich snippet gains, but im a web guy so have a keen interest in these kind of things.
With schema testing, I find it easiest to start from the most obvious problem, and try to work our way deeper from there. Note, I have zero experience with hcard, but I don't believe the error you mentioned actually has anything to do with your hcard properties.
The most obvious problem I see, is that your body tag has an itemtype of schema.org\Organization. When you set an itemtype on a dom element, you are saying that everything inside of that element is going to help describe that itemtype. Since you've placed this on your body element, you are quite literally telling Google that your entire page is about an organization.
From the content of your page, I would recommend changing that itemtype to schema.org\Person. This would seem to be a more accurate description. Once you make that change and run the scanner again, you may see more errors relating to the schema and we can work through those too (for example, you'll probably need to set familname and givenName).
With all of that said, you should know that currently there are no rich snippets that you will gain from adding this schema data. Properly setting this up on your page, is only good to do, especially since we don't know what rich snippets Google or others will expose in the future, but currently you won't see any additional rich snippets in Google search results from adding these tags. I don't want to discourage you from setting this up properly but I just want to set your expectations.
I've googled a lot but it seems to be rather difficult to find complete references on the web that is easily digestable,
anyhow,
I've got a fully functioning html5 website that allows people to list their property online and run it in an ebay fashion, although I'd like to optimise my code with schema html tags, from what I gather I can use the schema.org/thing item but I was wondering if there is anything dedicated more to property and also I wanted to ask if anybody managed to get the userinteraction tags working, for stuff like PageLikes etc
Depending on the property, you could use http://schema.org/SingleFamilyResidence or any other kind of http://schema.org/Residence. Also there are subtypes of http://schema.org/Store if you're allowing those kinds of properties. Really the list is pretty extensive of the types of properties you could have. See http://schema.org/docs/full.html for the entire list of schema.org types.
I often face a problem when I need to encapsulate some far apart fields in one form, and the fields in between them in other forms. Or encapsulating first two rows of a table in form and other two in other forms and so on. But of-course this is not allowed in standard practice. My question is why such tags like form (and other non displaying tags) have to be treated as "displaying" tags, and they also are restricted to be used at some places. Is there any genuine reason.
PS: what I was thinking about form in particular, that I define as many forms as I want at a single place, and give their references (eg ids or names) to the corresponding fields. That way form tag does not have to interfere somehow with the location of fields?
Asking "why" questions of HTML behaviour is not normally a useful activity. Very often the answer is "because one of the browsers originally did it that way and we're stuck with it for backward-compatibility reasons".
Note also what #DanMan says about the displayability of <form>.
However, your description of declaring forms in one place and then having the controls associate with the forms by id, is very similar to what has been done with the HTML5 form attribute. The only difference is that the controls reference the forms, rather than the forms referencing the controls. All we need to do now is wait for implementations in the browsers.
How is a <form> a non-displaying element? You can apply all kinds of CSS on it, and they will show up. It's just that they usually have no default browser styles. It's a rookie mistake to wrap elements in <div>s and styling those, when the only thing inside them is a single element.
<div class="myform"><form>...</form></div>
<form><div class="myform">...</div></form>
Both equally superfluous. Just style the original element directly.
<form class="myform">...</form>
Now, before you jump on my back: I'm not saying you're doing that. Just a general advice.
About restricted usage: that's probably to make it easier for implementors (browser creators) and for backwards compatibility.
I have a number of non-page content items that are used as "callouts" on the side of pages throughout my website that I am building in Sitecore. Ideally I would like to be able to define the presentation information for these callouts independently. Then when a CMS author selects callouts for a particular page in the site, they know how to display themselves. I read an excellent blog post about how to do this here: http://www.awareweb.com/AwareBlog/InversionControl2.aspx. I used the first method that he describes in the post.
However my implementation of that code doesn't completely work. It seems to get the correct rendering and it iterates properly through the selected non-page callout items. But when it displays them on the page it seems like the callout items are still using Sitecore.Context.Item as their source item and not the source item that was passed in to them via the strDataSource variable as seen in the example code.
Do I have to do anything special in the code behind for the sublayouts for the callouts to tell them not to use Sitecore.Context.Item and instead to use the source item that was passed in? Otherwise I can't figure out why it's not working. Any ideas?
Thanks,
Corey
Setting the DataSource in a sublayout doesn't explicitly set the Context.Item to a different value, it just sets a property in a sublayout that it can use itself.
Rather than write up the solution again, John West's blog already covers this subject here, so I'd recommend you read that - http://www.sitecore.net/Community/Technical-Blogs/John-West-Sitecore-Blog/Posts/2010/11/How-to-Apply-Data-Sources-to-Sitecore-ASPNET-Presentation-Components.aspx
I would recommend using the SublayoutParameterHelper Shared Source library which provides a Helper and a base class to use with your sublayouts for accessing the Item represented by an ID set in the DataSource; John also cites this library in his blog post.