[uf-discuss] Microformats versus Microdata

[Micky Hulse]

On Sat, Jun 9, 2012 at 11:11 AM, Micky Hulse <mickyhulse.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> <http://www.schema.org/>

I thought this was interesting:

[[

Q: Why microdata? Why not RDFa or microformats?

Focusing on microdata was a pragmatic decision. Supporting multiple
syntaxes makes documentation for webmasters more complex and
introduces more overhead in terms of defining new formats.
Microformats are concise and easy to understand, but they don't offer
an open extensibility mechanism and the reuse of the class tag can
cause conflicts with website CSS. RDFa is extensible and very
expressive, but the substantial complexity of the language has
contributed to slower adoption. Microdata is the most recent
well-known standard, created along with HTML5. It strikes a balance
between extensibility and simplicity, and is most suitable for
building the schema.org. Google and Yahoo! have in the past supported
both microformats and RDFa for certain schemas and will continue to
support these syntaxes for those schemas. We will also be monitoring
the web for RDFa and microformats adoption and if they pick up, we
will look into supporting these syntaxes. Also read the section on the
data model for more on RDFa.

]]

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