On 07/23/2017 03:33 PM, Michael A. Peters wrote:
On 07/23/2017 02:42 PM, Qebui Nehebkau wrote:
*snip*
I can't speak for anyone else - I can barely speak for myself - but I
think
I'd argue that, intuitively, if your structured data isn't logically part
of your content, there's a good chance that it doesn't belong there at
all.
It logically describes the content, and because it is separate from the
content it describes, is much easier to manage and inspect and bugfix.
Just for example, with an audio, I can describe the creator as a person
including the company the person works for etc. in JSON-LD without
needing to have tags in the content for those things to add attributes
to. That's information that is useful to machines especially when
linking different objects from domains together but it isn't necessarily
useful to the person reading the web page.
So keeping the structured data separate from the content allows richer
details to be added to the structured data for machines to read without
needing to alter the design intended for the human readers of the page.
Two audiences are thus served without needing to compromise the design
for either, both machine and human.
But the content for machines doesn't need to be sent to humans where
they don't care about it, hence the desire for a standard header
machines that do want it can send to have it included.
A better example.
I run an audio site (all legal, no piracy, I'm anti-DRM but also pro
intellectual property) where users can select a category.
There could be, say, 12 audios in that category, but the web page only
displays one. If the user wants to listen to a different audio, they use
a select menu. If its the same artist, there's enough info in the data-*
attributes of the select menu items to swap the audio node w/o even an
ajax call, If different artist, I do make an ajax call because more than
just the audio node changes.
With JSON-LD I can put structured data for all audios the person can
play from that page into the JSON-LD. I can't do that with tag based
structured data unless I make a div display display:none to contain all
the other audios.
I use libxml2 to create pages so I can modify any part of the DOM at any
point allowing me to create the JSON-LD from the same data used to
generate the page, so it is always in sync. I then can stuff it in the
head node at the end.
That's not possible with many platforms that send content before it is
finished generating all the page, so JSON-LD for many may not have the
kind of advantage I can from it, but the ability to describe objects
available through user actions (such as select menu) but aren't part of
the DOM when the page is sent is a huge benefit to me over tag based
implementations of structured data.
Hope that sheds some light on why I had an epiphany when I finally
stopped to read about JSON-LD.
Now, back on topic, a header would be nice so I only have to stuff it in
the head when a machine is asking for it ;)
