If you’re looking at this in a Google+ link to its home on tbray.org, the snippet describing it should be exactly the same as the paragraph you’re now reading.
This required the addition of three little chunks of schema.org markup to the HTML:
On the <body> tag:
itemscope='' itemtype='http://schema.org/Blog'Over at schema.org they suggest you just say
itemscope itemtype='whatever', but screw that, it’s not well-formed.On the <h1> tag (which in this blog echoes the HTML <title>),
itemprop='name'.On the <p> tag for the first paragraph,
itemprop='description'.
Of course, this is all done automatically; it doesn’t appear in the upstream XML.
Now that I’m standing on the slippery schema.org slope, I could add all sorts of extra markup, because after all I do talk about books and music and movies and so on. But that’d be work, and I’d need to be convinced that there’d be a payoff; I’ve historically been skeptical about semantic technologies.
Another thing I could do would be add equivalent markup in the Open Graph flavor. Once again, I’d want to hear about the benefits first.
Sure is nice having your own blog publishing system when you’re trying to develop an educated opinion about this stuff.
Contributions
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: W^L+ (Feb 12 2012, at 20:58)
Your first tweet was the first I've heard of Schema.org. It seems similar in purpose and technique to Microformats.org. Is there a reason you chose one and not the other?
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From: Manu Sporny (Feb 12 2012, at 21:03)
Keep in mind that RDFa 1.1 Lite will be supported by schema.org as well in the near future:
http://blog.schema.org/2011/11/using-rdfa-11-lite-with-schemaorg.html
Your blog description would be this in RDFa 1.1:
<body vocab="http://schema.org/" typeof="Blog">
...
<h1 property="name">...</h1>
<p property="description">...</p>
The benefit is that if you use RDFa 1.1, you can also use Facebook OpenGraph markup (which is really just RDFa) at the top of your page as well and use the same simple markup language to target both Facebook and Google/Microsoft/Yahoo/Yandex.
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From: Jake Spurlock (Feb 12 2012, at 23:43)
IMO, you should just you the Open Graph tags. Google Plus features will work just fine with them, (and subsequently, Facebook too.)
<blockquote>If the page contains Open Graph properties for the title, image, and description, then they will be used for the +Snippet.</blockquote>
via Google+ Platform
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From: Bud Gibson (Feb 13 2012, at 04:55)
Well, yes, your own publishing system is great but also high maintenance.
I do like that these features are available. I'm sure there's a way to alter templates in other systems to get this in.
But, in the end, it really just boils down to writing a lead (executive summary) and a good title with a good image. How the g+ syndication ecosystem needs to evolve is that it makes it easy for people to just do this. Most people in the US with even just liberal arts educations have these skills. Elsewhere, too.
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From: Curtis Pew (Feb 13 2012, at 08:10)
I view your Atom feed (http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/ongoing.atom) in NetNewsWire Lite, and this post was pretty much unreadable. It looks like some of the markup you were describing didn’t get escaped properly.
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From: Jeffrey Yasskin (Feb 14 2012, at 08:10)
"Well-formed" is relative to the syntax you're targeting. In the HTML syntax, omitting the ='' is perfectly well-formed: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/syntax.html#attributes-0. It's only in the XHTML syntax that it's not.
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