Vanilla Ice was also rollin' -- in the 80's
Well folks, it’s deployment season again here at Best Buy, which means lots of changes, late night code deployments, and business project managers running around with their hair on fire. It also means it’s time to sneak some good structured data type stuff on to the site without actually having to explain in detail what’s so gosh darn important about delivering rich data in our site’s HTML output. It’s with great pleasure that I announce the official launch of schema.org reviews markup on all pages of bestbuy.com, gradually rollin’ out over the next couple of days to a browser near you.
So why schema.org? I was fortunate enough to participate in the schema.org workshop in Mountain View last month where a bunch of really smart people were talking structured data on the web. If you know anything about the history between some of the individuals attending, you’d figure we would have several opposing viewpoints and many arguments would ensue. To my surprise, this was not the case — we had a great day of very constructive talks. And with this warm and fuzzy spirit of goodwill, I figured it was time to put the rubber to the road and release a new standard for all to test.
If you’re still wondering why schema.org, please take a gander at these thoughts:
- Yep, it’s Microdata, but it’s about schema, not syntax. I’ve been doing my homework, and I believe the product reviews vocabulary created by the Google-Rich-Snippets-now-schema.org group is a solid and well thought out vocabulary. Additionally, the consensus from the workshop was the support of multiple syntaxes, so I’m not terribly worries about being lambasted for trying a new syntax
. - I still love RDFa. One of the greatest things about RDFa is it’s out of the box support for multiple types/ vocabularies, which was also a desired requirement coming out of the schema.org workshop. I was also moved by the excellent presentation by Ben Adida, where he talked RDFa and the new RDFa 1.1 Lite, which looks very, very promising. Plans are already in the works to port a segment of the reviews to RDFa 1.1 Lite, with a little help from my friends.
- Continuing to push for changes in the schema — most notably support for multiple types.
- It could be one of the first large deployments of schema.org serve as an example. Suggestions? Comments? Want to see the code change to point your parser at? Let me know, let’s create something wonderful for the web.
Finally, if you’re curious, check out this Sony TV example.
