CODEWITHSUNDEEP
htmlschema.orgmicrodatagoogle-rich-snippets
Alexei Danchenkov
Alexei Danchenkov

Reputation: 2082

Structured data validation error: illustration (CreativeWork) inside an Article is not a valid image attribute?

I normally tagged illustrations and photographs inside articles as CreativeWork - to credit appropriate authors (creators of visuals).

<article itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Article">
  <h1 itemprop="headline">Headline</h1>
  <p itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">by <span itemprop="name">John Public</span></p>

  <figure itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/CreativeWork">
    <img itemprop="image" src="http://example.com/artwork.jpg" alt="Artwork" />
    <figcaption itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">Illustration by <span itemprop="name">George Smith</span></figcaption>
  </figure>

  <p>Full content of the article.</p>
</article>

So far so good. Article has its author as well as the illustration, both properly credited.

However, according to the Google validation tool, image is a required attribute for Article type, otherwise the code above is not passing the validation. This is not, however, a requirement of the Article Schema.

How do I escape code duplication, pass Google Schema validation and still credit both authors and illustrators?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 241

Answers (1)

unor
unor

Reputation: 96507

Schema.org has no required properties, but consumers, like Google Search, may of course require that certain properties are provided for doing something with your data (e.g., showing a Rich Snippet).

If you want to get Google’s Rich Snippet for Articles, you have to provide the properties headline, image, and datePublished.

If the image represents the article (in contrast to an image that is just part of the article, but not representative), you could use the image property to reference the ImageObject¹ from the Article.
For that, you just have to add the itemprop to the figure element:

<figure itemprop="image" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject">

If the image is not representative, you should not use this (in which case you probably don’t get this Article Rich Snippet). To still be able to reference² the image(s) from the Article, you could use the hasPart property:

<figure itemprop="hasPart" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject">

¹ You are using CreativeWork, but if the work is an image, you’d ideally use the sub-type ImageObject and its contentUrl property.

² If you don’t use a property to reference the ImageObject from the Article, they are in no kind of relation. The HTML nesting does not affect the Microdata unless you use itemprop.

Upvotes: 2

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