menu-formats

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Per process, for documenting existing restaurant menu publishing formats.

See recipe-formats for an example of how to grow this page.

schema.org

schema.org has a menu type with a high degree of complexity. There are over 100 properties associated with it, many of which have little or nothing to do with restaurant menus:

learningResourceType

a menu is not a learning resource, except I suppose as a way to learn what food they offer, which is sort of tautological

publisherImprint

this is described as "The publishing division which published the comic"; why this property is part of the Menu type is beyond my comprehension

timeRequired

this indicates the time it takes to read the work; the time it takes to read a menu is hardly relevant for a web author or user

The Menu type has other properties that are better handled with existing HTML constructs:

inLanguage

authors can instead use the lang attribute, either on the root element or some other suitable container

educationalAlignment

restaurants aren't generally aligned with a school, and if they were, that would be better handled with a nested Restaurant type; for microformats, a nested h-card would be easy and intuitive

translationOfWork

authors can instead use rel attributes, perhaps on link elements in a document head

The complexity is part of the schema.org philosophy of adding properties and types for every possible variation and contingency of web publishing, at the expense of making it difficult and intimidating for web authors to adopt. It appears that schema.org no longer publishes adoption rates, so it's hard to gauge whether their Menu schema is actually being used in the wild.

See Also

• menu