I have a page where the <title> tag contains some text (specifically: the department name) that screen readers do not pronounce very well (the department's name is ‘AskHR’ -- it’s the HR department’s helpdesk).
I want to provide screen readers with a more pronounceable version (‘Ask H R’) whilst keeping the more stylised version for visual display. I was thinking of using aria-label to achieve this, but I’m uncertain whether it can be applied to the <title> element in the <head>.
Can anyone confirm whether or not this is valid?
I don't think this is valid.
First not all screen readers are made equal!
What you're trying to do may work in some but not in others. For example VoiceOver reads out "AskHR" as you would expect. (And ignores the aria-label attribute.)
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title aria-label="xxx">AskHR</title>
</head>
<body>
<button aria-label="close">X</button>
</body>
</html>
I think this is perhaps closer to what you're trying to do but support is limited:
.label {
speak-as: spell-out
}
See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/#counter-style/speak-as
If we inspect the example above in Chrome, you see this for the <button> element:
The aria-label attribute takes over the button content. VoiceOver reads out "close" instead of "x".
However this is what we see for <title>:
We use schema.org to markup a number of different data types. I have typically relied on the Google testing tool to confirm that my schema is correct, but I've found that I get mixed results when testing with Bing, Yandex, Linter and MOZ.
Currently my 'aggregaterating' schema appears valid in Google's tester, but I get no results on Bing (can't find the markup) and Yandex/Linter both show errors. This makes me wonder if my schema is actually correct.
This was my original version which was OK on Google but got no results (no data found) on any of the other testers.
<div itemprop="aggregateRating" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/AggregateRating">
<meta itemprop="itemReviewed" content="https://schema.org/LocalBusiness">
<meta itemprop="ratingValue" content="4.6">
<meta itemprop="reviewCount" content="3,950">
</div>
This is my updated version that now, at least partially, is seen by Linter and Yandex. I still get nothing from MOZ and Bing.
<div itemscope="" itemtype="https://schema.org/Organization">
<meta itemprop="name" content="Company">
<div itemprop="aggregateRating" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/AggregateRating">
<meta itemprop="itemReviewed" content="https://schema.org/LocalBusiness">
<meta itemprop="ratingValue" content="4.6">
<meta itemprop="reviewCount" content="3,950">
</div></div>
Any feedback on the format? Something I am missing? Also, has anyone else had the mixed validation issue with other testers? I find that really odd.
Nesting an Offer that has a priceSpecification inside a Product throws up an Incomplete microdata warning in Google Rich Snippets testing tool.
This
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
<h1 itemprop="name">1984 Vintage Selection Cabernet Sauvignon</h1>
<p itemprop="description">Cabernet Sauvignon.</p>
<div itemprop="offers" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Offer">
<p itemprop="priceSpecification" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/priceSpecification">Prices start at
<meta itemprop="priceCurrency" content="GBP" />£<span itemprop="price">0.71</span> (per bottle)</p>
<meta itemprop="validThrough" content="2013-09-01" />
</div>
</div>
throws the following warning in google rich snippets testing tool:
Warning: Incomplete microdata with schema.org.
If I move Offer outside Product:
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
<h1 itemprop="name">1984 Vintage Selection Cabernet Sauvignon</h1>
<p itemprop="description">Cabernet Sauvignon.</p>
</div>
<div itemprop="offers" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Offer">
<p itemprop="priceSpecification" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/priceSpecification">Prices start at
<meta itemprop="priceCurrency" content="GBP" />£<span itemprop="price">0.71</span> (per bottle)</p>
<meta itemprop="validThrough" content="2013-09-01" />
</div>
then the warning is no longer thrown up, but this doesn't appear to make sense, as the Offer is not linked to the Product it's applicable to.
All the examples at schema.org nest Offer within Product, however, none of them use priceSpecification. I could only find one blog post where Offer is not nested within Product: http://seolobster.de/richsnippets-schema-org-products-update. This does not fill me with confidence to use in a live environment.
Which is correct? Especially if you throw in more than one Offer?
I have the same problem and I just figured it out though painstaking trial-and-error: The problem is that, even though price is part of the priceSpecification schema, it still needs to be defined outside the priceSpecification metatag in the regular offer, too!
I needed priceSpecification because we show prices including and excluding VAT, and now I have no frickin' idea on how to implement this! If I HAVE to define the price in offer, how do I tell it it's with or without VAT? valueAddedTaxIncluded is not part of the offer schema! An empty div just including valueAddedTaxIncluded=true? Okay, so how do I implement the other price without the VAT then? That would define the price twice in the offer, and that's not possible!
Also, why is schema.org and getschema.org so damn effing useless when it comes to samplecode and how to properly implement any given schema? If you want people to adopt some fancy new technology - TELL THEM HOW TO DO IT!!
Based on your example I don't think you need to use a separate priceSpecification property. Instead you can directly add the price and priceCurrency property to the Offer like the example below.
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
<h1 itemprop="name">1984 Vintage Selection Cabernet Sauvignon</h1>
<p itemprop="description">Cabernet Sauvignon.</p>
<div itemprop="offers" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Offer">
Prices start at <meta itemprop="priceCurrency" content="GBP" />£
<span itemprop="price">0.71</span> (per bottle)
</div>
</div>
As stated before, the offer also needs the price-tag. One solution that the tag-tester allows is adding the data as a meta-tag like this:
<meta itemprop="price" content="79" />
I'm not sure if google will parse and show this however.
I have a HTML page that displays an event. Together with the event there are reviews and an aggregated rating.
Now I want to add structured data with schema.org to be extracted by search engines.
The item type http://schema.org/Event does not support the properties "aggregateRating" or "review".
I tried to put different item scopes next to each other. I have linked them by using the "itemReviewed" property as a link to an "itemid":
<div itemid="#myevent" itemtype="http://schema.org/Event" itemscope>
....
<dl itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating" itemscope>
<link href="#myevent" itemprop="itemReviewed">
<meta content="4.5" itemprop="ratingValue">
<meta content="6" itemprop="reviewCount">
...
</dl>
<dl itemtype="http://schema.org/Review" itemscope>
<link href="#myevent" itemprop="itemReviewed">
<p itemtype="http://schema.org/Rating" itemscope
itemprop="reviewRating">Rating: <img src="...">
<meta content="4" itemprop="ratingValue">
</p>
...
</dl>
</div>
Google Rich Snippet Tool does not complain. But in the preview it only displays one of the review items. No display of event date or location. No display of aggregate review.
I don't know if this is just a problem of Snippet Tool or if real Google Search extracts the same.
Could you please tell me how I could improve my markup?
Is the usage of itemid / link correct?
Is there any schema that has startdate, enddate and aggregateRating and reviews?
I'm dealing with the same problem. The best solution I found was to use Microformats.
So you calculate the average rating for the event (rating you want to show on Google's rich snippet) and do this:
<div itemid="#myevent" itemtype="http://schema.org/Event" itemscope class="hreview-aggregate">
<h1 class="fn" itemprop="name">Event</h1>
<div>
Rated <span class="rating">3.5</span>/5 based on <span class="count">11</span> reviews
</div>
<dl itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating" itemscope>
<link href="#myevent" itemprop="itemReviewed">
...
</div>
That should do the trick. The only problem is that then you get Warning
Warning: If count is specified in review aggregate, page should contain reviews. Otherwise you may want to use votes. More information about aggregate reviews.
I've got a site coded in XHTML 1.0 Strict. I want to use the new Microdata to add breadcrumbs to my site (so Google will understand them).
My old non-microdata marked-up breadcrumbs look like this:
<ul>
<li>Level 1</li>
<li>Level 2</li>
<li>Level 3</li>
</ul>
According to Google, to markup breadcrumbs using Microdata, you extend the above code like this:
<ul>
<li itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Breadcrumb">
<a href="..." itemprop="url">
<span itemprop="title">Level 1</span>
</a>
</li>
...
</ul>
But this is not valid XHTML 1.0 Strict.
What should I do?
Should I ignore the validation conflicts?
Should I write itemscope="itemscope" instead of just itemscope (this would be valid XML, but still not valid XHTML)?
Should I change the Doctype to be HTML5 instead of XHTML 1.0 Strict?
I want this to work all the way back to IE6!
Please advice :)
Yes, if you wanted to use itemscope in XHTML, you would need to write itemscope="itemscope" and use XHTML5 (same DOCTYPE as HTML5, but XML syntax).
itemscope is not included in W3 HTML5, but present in WHATWG's version, so validation may continue to be a difficulty. There seems to be quite some political argument on this issue, which I haven't been following as it looks fairly tedious.
For the moment, if you want to use breadcrumb annotations in a finalised, validatable document format, you could use RDFa instead: the alternative (but older) proposal, which the argument is all about, and use the existing doctype:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML+RDFa 1.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/DTD/xhtml-rdfa-1.dtd">
Since the major search engines have decided on schema.org last June (2011) as the way to do rich snippets, this question has become much more important seeing XHTML5 does not yet have a working DTD (BTW, http://www.html5dtd.org/ is working on a XHTML5 DTD and may well be ready when you read this, if so disregard what I'm about to say). And what I am about to say summarises a page I placed at http://www.nedprod.com/programs/portable/XHTMLwithHTML5microdata/ a few weeks ago, and there has more detail including a rich snippets demo if you want it.
I had need of extending XHTML 1.x Strict with schema.org/HTML5 microdata and getting it all to validate properly for updating nedprod, and Microsoft Expression Web has the occasional tendency to eat bits of HTML it edits, so validation is handy for catching when it borks. Hence I have created these DTDs which extend the standard XHTML 1.0 ones:
http://www.nedprod.com/xhtml1-strict-with-html5-microdata.dtd
http://www.nedprod.com/xhtml1-transitional-with-html5-microdata.dtd
To use, take a copy of your desired DTD (don't use the original from nedprod, I can't afford the bandwidth) and use as follows:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict with HTML5 microdata//EN" "xhtml1-strict-with-html5-microdata.dtd">
or ...
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional with HTML5 microdata//EN" "xhtml1-transitional-with-html5-microdata.dtd">
... or more likely, override the DTD used for validation by your particular XML validating setup.
BTW, here's something interesting, and I only include this as it's useful to know when answering the question. I honest to God thought that using the above doctypes would invoke quirks mode when rendering. Turns out, much to my great surprise, that IE8, Chrome 14, Firefox 5 and Opera 11.50 all render such a doctype in Standards mode. Who would have thought! So you could, if you wanted to, upload your XHTML pages onto the public internet with the custom doctype and the newer browsers at least would do the right thing.
Hope this helps someone,
Niall
Valid HTML 5 example
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Example page</title>
</head>
<body>
<div itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/MediaObject">
<div itemprop="video" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/VideoObject">
<meta itemprop="name" content="Breast Augmentation Video Diary">
<meta itemprop="duration" content="PT12M54S">
<meta itemprop="thumbnailUrl" content="http://www.plastic-surgery-estonia.com/new-assets/images/thumbnails/breast-augmentation.jpg">
<meta itemprop="contentURL" content="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwPN6eCpxTk">
<meta itemprop="embedURL" content="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=BwPN6eCpxTk">
<meta itemprop="uploadDate" content="2010-11-09">
<iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/BwPN6eCpxTk?rel=0&autohide=1&modestbranding=1&showinfo=0"></iframe>
<span itemprop="description">Video Diary</span>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Found these links helpful:
- http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2413309&topic=1088474&ctx=topic
- http://www.reelseo.com/embedded-youtube-indexed-google/
Use the application/ld+json MIME type and a microdata generator to transform the markup into data:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>microdata.xhtml</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8"/>
</head>
<body>
<div>
<script type="application/ld+json">
{"items": [{
"type": ["https://schema.org/breadcrumb"],
"properties":{
"url": ["..."],
"title": ["Level 1"]
}
}]
}
</script>
</div>
</body>
</html>
or a data:uri in an object tag:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>microdata.xhtml</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8"/>
</head>
<body>
<div>
<object data="data:text/html;charset=utf-8;base64,PHVsPiA8bGkgaXRlbXNjb3BlIGl0ZW10eXBlPSJodHRwOi8vZGF0YS12b2NhYnVsYXJ5Lm9yZy9CcmVhZGNydW1iIj4gICAgICAgICA8YSBocmVmPSIuLi4iIGl0ZW1wcm9wPSJ1cmwiPiAgICAgICAgICAgPHNwYW4gaXRlbXByb3A9InRpdGxlIj5MZXZlbCAxPC9zcGFuPiAgICAgICAgIDwvYT4gICAgICAgICA8L2xpPiAgICAgICA8L3VsPg==">
<?microdata
<ul>
<li itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Breadcrumb">
<a href="..." itemprop="url">
<span itemprop="title">Level 1</span>
</a>
</li>
</ul>
?>
</object>
<!--[if lt IE 8]>
<object data="mhtml://#foo">
<?microdata
<ul>
<li itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Breadcrumb">
<a href="..." itemprop="url">
<span itemprop="title">Level 1</span>
</a>
</li>
</ul>
?>
<div id="foo">
PHVsPiA8bGkgaXRlbXNjb3BlIGl0ZW10eXBlPSJodHRwOi8vZGF0YS12b2NhYnVsYXJ5Lm9yZy9CcmVhZGNydW1iIj4gICAgICAgICA8YSBocmVmPSIuLi4iIGl0ZW1wcm9wPSJ1cmwiPiAgICAgICAgICAgPHNwYW4gaXRlbXByb3A9InRpdGxlIj5MZXZlbCAxPC9zcGFuPiAgICAgICAgIDwvYT4gICAgICAgICA8L2xpPiAgICAgICA8L3VsPg==
</div>
</object>
<![endif]-->
</div>
</body>
</html>
I want this to work all the way back to IE6!
Use the application/xhtml+xml XSLT shim to support IE6 and extend it to get a copy of the markup.
References
MDN: Base64 Encoding and Decoding
Images in a Web Page
MIME E-mail Encapsulation of Aggregate Documents, such as HTML (MHTML)
Mapping Microdata to RDF
data:URI Tests
Examining, implementing and testing of RFC2557 (MHTML)
MHTML URIs
HTML5: Differences from HTML4
try and validate some of google's pages...they don't validate.
validation is a tool, an awesome one, but nothing more, although i do applaud your determination. if you're that worried about validation i would switch to HTML5 .