Questions on Data-Vocabulary.org and Schema.org for Breadcrumbs

Question

I am very new to schemas (this is my first time) and I am a little confused on this info. I was reading into schemas for breadcrumbs and I came across 2 different methods:

• Google way: From what I read from here, Google shows example of adding Microdata using http://data-vocabulary.org/Breadcrumb

• Schema.org example: The example in Schema.org shows a very different approach. Something like this:

  <div itemprop="breadcrumb">
    <a href="category/books.html">Books</a> >
    <a href="category/books-literature.html">Literature & Fiction</a> >
    <a href="category/books-classics">Classics</a>
  </div>
  

My questions are:

• (1) Is it better for me to use the Schema.org method instead of Data-Vocabulary.org in 2014? When I read the discussions in this topic here where some has said that Data-Vocabulary.org is outdated and Schema.org is the latest method. Is this a valid statement for today? I have still seen a lot of websites using Data-Vocabulary.org similar to Google's example.

• (2) The Schema.org method is too simple and unlike Google's Data-vocabulary.org example that adds itemprop="url" for URLs, itemprop="title" for titles, etc. individually. But the Schema.org method just wraps the whole breadcrumbs and doesn't declare individual URLs and titles. So would Google's search engine understand the URLs and titles if I used the Schema.org method? Or is Google's Data-Vocabulary.org method better for Google's search engine results?

• (3) Lastly, with the breadcrumb separator does it only show the separator used in the HTML markup? For instance, I have breadcrumb separator added via CSS and it's not in the HTML markup. So in this case, if the breadcrumbs are shown in search results, would it automatically add the > separator or will it show exactly the way I've shown in my HTML?

Answer 1

Schema.org and Data-Vocabulary.org are vocabularies. If you want, you could use both of them for the same content (the Microdata syntax makes this hard/impossible, but it’s easy with the RDFa syntax).

If you are interested in a specific consumer for your markup, it makes sense to check their documentation to see what exactly they support (of course you can’t be sure if their documentation is correct and complete).

In case of Google Search and their Rich Snippets, the documentation would be: Rich snippets - Breadcrumbs (currently "experimental"). On this page, they only give examples using the Data-Vocabulary.org.

(Note: Stack Overflow is the wrong place for discussing actual support and behaviour of third-party services like Google Search. On our sister site Webmasters such questions might be on-topic.)