CODEWITHSUNDEEP
htmlmicrodata
Andreas Rejbrand
Andreas Rejbrand

Reputation: 108963

HTML5 microdata: span content?

I have read the HTML5 specification, the microdata specification, and the WHATWG HTML5 (with microdata) specification. These are well written and easy to understand.

But now I read the schema.org Book specification, and came across snippets like the following:

<span itemprop="price" content="6.99">$6.99</span>
<span itemprop="inLanguage" content="en">English-language</span>
<span itemprop="name" content="Tolkien, J. R. R. (John Ronald Reuel)">
  J. R. R. Tolkien</span>

Apparently (compare with the JSON version), the values of these microdata properties are the values of the content attributes of the span elements. (Of course, if there is no content attribute, the value is instead the textContents of the span element.)

But I cannot find any support for this practice in the HTML and microdata specifications. In fact, I cannot even find any evidence that there is a content attribute on span elements at all!

So, I suppose the schema.org example is non-conforming. But is it also plain wrong? If not, where does this practice come from, and how accepted is it?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1696

Answers (2)

Luneya
Luneya

Reputation: 31

(Sorry, I didn't have enough reputation to post a comment.)

We're at the end of 2017 now. Somehow, the MDN webdocs (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_attributes/itemprop) and the schema docs (http://schema.org/telephone) still propose to use a content attribute on span using microdata. No html5 validator will accept this of course.

Upvotes: 3

unor
unor

Reputation: 96597

Yes, this is wrong. Neither Microdata nor HTML5 define a content attribute for the span element.

Several people wanted to use it, see for example the code in these questions:

I’m not sure where exactly this confusion is coming from.

(It doesn’t help that Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool incorrectly uses the content attribute instead of the element content; but at least all other Microdata parsers seem to do it correctly.)

Maybe some people got confused because RDFa (but not Microdata) defines and allows the content attribute for span. See HTML+RDFa’s Extensions to the HTML5 Syntax:

For the avoidance of doubt, the following RDFa attributes are allowed on all elements in the HTML5 content model: @vocab, @typeof, @property, @resource, @prefix, @content, @about, @rel, @rev, @datatype, and @inlist.

Upvotes: 6

Related Questions