Open Your Data Up to Bots Using Microdata

CRANK

Microdata is another technology that’s rapidly gaining adoption and support, but, unlike WAI-ARIA, it’s technically part of HTML5. Although still early in development, it’s worth mentioning the Microdata specification here, because the technology provides a peek into what may be the future of document readability and semantics. In the spec, Microdata is defined as a mechanism that “allows machine-readable data to be embedded in HTML documents in an easy-to-write manner, with an unambiguous parsing model.” With Microdata, page authors can add specific labels to HTML elements, annotating them so that they can be read by machines or bots. This is done by means of a customized vocabulary. For example, you might want a script or other third-party service to be able to access your pages and interact with specific elements on the page in a certain manner. With Microdata, you can extend existing semantic elements (such as article and figure) to allow those services to have specialized ac…