earlier replies
Replying to @ChrisFerdinandi
It is a disgusting mess; a far better way to do it is to use JSON-LD. Intertwining the properties with HTML markup sounds like a nice idea, but in practice it ends up being really difficult to work with. - nystudio107.com/blog/json-ld… - nystudio107.com/blog/annotat…

Annotated JSON-LD Structured Data Examples

Want to see a some real-world examples of JSON-LD Structured Data "in the wild"? This article has that, plus annotation.

nystudio107.com
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I don't think "move markup semantics to JavaScript" is better. If anything, it's worse.
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It's not JavaScript, it's JSON-LD—literally it's just JSON Linked Data, there's nothing executable about it It's significantly nicer to work with than the old intermingling of HTML & itemprop stuff. I've done both for many years, and by far prefer it separated out into JSON-LD
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Cf. manu.sporny.org/2013/json-ld…
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And, from a "why use JSON-LD rather than [fill in name of syntax here]" see yoast.com/yoast-seo-11-0/

Yoast SEO 11.0: Structured data awesomeness

Yoast SEO 11.0 comes with a revamped Schema structured data implementation. It's the first plugin to produce a full graph. Find out more!

yoast.com
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Yep, trust me, I'm 100% on board. JSON-LD is so nice to work with.
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This still requires you to parse JSON onto the HTML, no? Am I maybe just missing something?
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3/2 Additionally, it's much easier to *generate* JSON-LD because it isn't tied to the HTML structure. So the tooling is much better in terms of tools that can dynamically or statically generate the JSON-LD for you, based on your inputs. Doing that with microformats is not easy
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if you're generating HTML from templates anyway, generating microformats means adding a few classes (and a parsing testcase to your build). Not maintaining another sidefile in an entirely different structure with different syntax.
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I know that you're a huge microformats fan Kevin, but among other things: 1) they're not remotely expressive enough for contemporary structured data requirements; 2) they're HTML-bound, meaning you can't provide data like this developers.google.com/action…

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developers.google.com
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