Things people get wrong in RDFa markup

Lately, I’ve been looking a lot of both RDFa and Microdata formatted HTML. There are a number of things that authors (even experts) regularly get wrong:

@src and @rel attributes create reverse relation

Having code such as the following:

<img rel="image" src="image.jpg" />
...

You’d think that this would indicate that the icon for the document is

<> xhv:image <image.jpg>

but it actually says:

<image.jpg> xhv:image <> .

The why of this is lost in the haze of history, but people regularly get this wrong. To get what you need, consider something like the following markup:

<span rel="image"><img src="image.jpg" /></span>
...

@rel and @typeof and/or @about shouldn’t be on the same element

Another common mistake is format such as the following:

<div rel="mainContentOfPage" about="#me" typeof="Person">
  <p>
    Name: <span property="name">Gregg Kellogg</span></p>
  <p>
    Knows: <a href="https://greggkellogg.net/#me" rel="knows">Myself</a></p>
</div>

Placing @rel and @about or @typeof on the same element indicates that the @about/@typeof indicate the subject not the object of a relation. To get the desired effect, use @resource (or @href), however, this does not let you set the type of the object resource. Alternatively, use the following type of markup:

<div rel="mainContentOfPage">
  <div about="#me" typeof="Person">
    <p>
      Name: <span property="name">Gregg Kellogg</span></p>
    <p>
      Knows: <a href="https://greggkellogg.net/#me" rel="knows">Myself</a>
    </p>
  </div>
</div>

Another area of common mis-understanding is that the document order of statements within an HTML document is not significant when creating a list of resources. Consider the following example from schema.org/MusicPlaylist:

<div itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/MusicPlaylist">
  <span itemprop="name">Classic Rock Playlist</span>
  <div itemprop="tracks" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/MusicRecording">
    1. <span itemprop="name">Sweet Home Alabama</span> - <span itemprop="byArtist">Lynard Skynard</span>
  </div>
  <div itemprop="tracks" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/MusicRecording">
    2. <span itemprop="name">Shook you all Night Long</span> - <span itemprop="byArtist">AC/DC</span>
  </div>
  ...
</div>

You would think that this describes a track ordering, but it does not (at least in RDF). Doing this requires RDF List constructs missing from both Microdata and RDFa. In Turtle, you could do it as follows:

@prefix: <http://schema.org> .
[ a :MusicPlaylist;
  :name "Classic Rock Playlist";
  :numTracks 5;
  :tracks (
    [ a :MusicRecording; :name "Sweet Home Alabama"; :byArtist "Lynard Skynard"]
    [a :MusicRecording; :name "Shook you all Night Long"; :byArtist "AC/DC"]
    ...
  )
]

It would seem obvious that an HTML ordered list could be used to generate an RDF List, but it received to achieve enough interest to make it through.

These are just a couple of things that are confusing about RDFa, and offer good fodder for Microdata proponents to complain about the complexity of RDFa markup. It’s important to note that a core goal of RDFa 1.1 is to be compatible with RDFa 1.0 (RDFa in XHTML), in which these decisions were established. Perhaps a reconciliation between Microdata and RDFa could take the best of both:

• Craft RDF friendly URIs from terms (such as schema:Person above),
• Reduce amount of document structure needed to describe common use cases,
• Better intuitive generation of RDF output,
• Ability to avoid RDF generation and go straight to JSON (perhaps JSON-LD),
• Use common URI prefixes,
• RDF Lists,
• Promote better HTML readability.

That’s my 2 cents (for now)

Update

The RDFa Working Group recently decided to change the behavior of @src in RDFa Core 1.1 to be the same as @href. This means that

<img rel="image" src="image.jpg" />
...

Actually does now generate the following:

<> xhv:image <image.jpg>

Recent updates to Microdata to RDF processing now do place multiple items in a list, but this is subject to further specification.

In RDFa, this can now be done with the @inlist attribute, which places values in an RDF Collection (rdf:List).

<div vocab="http://schema.org/" typeof="MusicPlaylist">
  <span property="name">Classic Rock Playlist</span>
  <div rel="tracks" inlist="">
    1. <div typeof="MusicRecording">
          <span property="name">Sweet Home Alabama</span> - <span property="byArtist">Lynard Skynard</span>
  </div>
  2. <div typeof="MusicRecording">
        <span property="name">Shook you all Night Long</span> - <span property="byArtist">AC/DC</span>
  </div>
  ...
</div>

Now generates the following Turtle:

@prefix: <http://schema.org> .
[ a :MusicPlaylist;
  :name "Classic Rock Playlist";
  :tracks (
    [ a :MusicRecording; :name "Sweet Home Alabama"; :byArtist "Lynard Skynard"]
    [ a :MusicRecording; :name "Shook you all Night Long"; :byArtist "AC/DC"]
    ...
  )
]