schema.org microdata vocabulary

Question

Search providers recommend using itemprop="mainContentOfPage" with itemscope="itemscope" itemtype="http://schema.org/CreativeWork/WebPage/AboutPage" without any guaranty to improvise their search results.

Why do search providers refrain from using the schema.org vocabulary they've blessed?

If Google wanted to abstain being evil, then how is reinventing microformats in the name of standardizing rich snippets & allying with non-generic vocabularies, those non-parse-able by XSL justified?

Answer 1

schema.org vocabulary, being generic, is too vast to be practical to improve UX, though Google's attempt is commendable. Failure frequency is noteworthy particularly for fake review spam inside search. Still for specific tasks, sticking to XFN & RDFa namespaces such as FOAF as the input vocabulary in micro-data is cleaner option so implementers are never lost. As for XSL parsing, new XSL files will need to be written as microdata takes over through HTML5 and vocabulary customization can be built into implementation as explained by http://richard.cyganiak.de/2011/10/microdata.html Also as the notion of structured data is rooted within that of semantic web, regardless of who's who, vocabulary support for certain RDFa vocabularies is compelled by semantic web's RDFa initial context at http://www.w3.org/2011/rdfa-context/rdfa-1.1.html and http://www.w3.org/2011/rdfa-context/html-rdfa-1.1