Is there a benefit to Microdata vs. RDFa Lite?
-
Is there any community consensus about whether Microdata or RDFa Lite is the superior rich-snippet format?
I work as a design/front-end-developer and in terms of pure coding, RDFa Lite seems the superior method. It looks to be more flexible and more extensible. The W3C spec is also more mature—it's a W3C Recommendation where Microdata is only a W3C Working Draft—so it's more likely to reach full standardization sooner. Also, because it's a Recommendation it's less likely to change.
However, I hear Google "strongly recommends" the use of Microdata. Do they not support RDFa/RDFa Lite?
There doesn't seem to be a great deal of discussion on this anywhere so I'm tempted to think it's sort of irrelevant. I am aware that Schema.org is, supposedly, now supporting RDFa Lite.
-
Google does support RDFa. However, on their own site (which is notoriously bad at giving us info) it says "Google suggests using microdata" - that's enough for me. I have a few clients still on RDFa and from what I've seen, as long as you can get results through the Structured Data test link, you're usually good to go either way.