This is the archive of the goodrelations dicussion list

Dear all:

I just posted a longer comment on www.readwriteweb.com, which may be relevant for the subscribers of this list, too:

Best
Martin Hepp

Begin forwarded message:

> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/is_schemaorg_really_a_google_land_grab.php#disqus_thread
> 
> Dear Richard,
> great post!
> 
> First a minor correction: Google and Yahoo have confirmed that they will continue to support GoodRelations in RDFa for product and offer information. The schema.org markup is simply a bit more prominently featured way of feeding such data into Google and does not differ significantly from their 2010-11-02 microdata recipe.
> 
> Second, interestingly, Bing announces on the very same page [1] both their schema.org recipes AND the indication that they will add GoodRelations support to their crawlers shortly.
> 
> Given the amount of shop extensions [2] and the usage of GoodRelations in pretty sophisticated ways by large companies like BestBuy or Volkswagen [3], where the power of RDFa is needed, I am confident that all three search engines will stick to their support of GoodRelations.
> 
> In fact, the simplification of the new microdata recipes is not as significant that it will really make a difference - in particular, if you compare it with the ease of GoodRelations snippets for copy-and-paste, created with the GoodRelations Snippet Generator [4] or the shop extensions for Magento or Joomla/Virtuemart.
> 
> Also, while schema.org may work for the US search market, the deployment of Rich Snippets in other countries will require additional properties, e.g. for shipment costs, because you need this kind of details for complying with regional legislation. For instance, a German shop must indicate the shipment charges in any price overview listing. The microdata approach for schema.org requires a one-size-fits-all vocabulary, which means you either have to bother all developers in the world with more properties (e.g. for VAT, shipment options, warranties), or miss those features.
> 
> So in a nutshell, I think that schema.org is first and most an attempt to foster the creating of simple, lightweight markup. For more sophisticated usages, GoodRelations in RDFa remains the better choice and will stay on Google's agenda. See the BestBuy and Volkswagen use-cases - neither application is doable with schema.org elements.
> 
> From my experience with GoodRelations, the main reason for the bit slow adoption of rich markup by smaller sites is simply the fact that Google's manual whitelisting process for rich snippets - no matter whether based on hProduct/hListing, Microdata, or GoodRelations in RDFa - is extremely slow. This frustrates people. If you add markup that validates with the Google validator, you would expect a rich snippet to shop up in a few weeks or so. But up to today, site owners often wait months until they see the effect.
> 
> If you do not believe that Google and Yahoo still heavily parse and process GoodRelations in RDFa, look at my suite of testcases that use very sophisticated GoodRelations patterns and still validate:
> 
>    http://www.heppnetz.de/rdfa4google/testcases.html
> 
> I don't think that Google developed a Web-scale infrastructure for parsing GoodRelations in RDFa just for the dustbin.
> 
> There may be a bit of dust covering this, and some wording on the schema.org site is misleading, but site-owners still have the choice to use either GoodRelations in RDFa or schema.org elements in Microdata syntax for e-commerce sites. 
> 
> Best wishes
> 
> Martin Hepp
> http://purl.org/goodrelations/
> 
> 1. http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/hh207242.aspx
> 2. http://wiki.goodrelations-vocabulary.org/Shop_extensions
> 3. http://www.volkswagen.co.uk/vocabularies/vvo/ns and http://www.volkswagen.co.uk/vocabularies/coo/ns
> 4. http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/grsnippetgen/
>