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

Cf. manu.sporny.org/2013/json-ld…

And, from a "why use JSON-LD rather than [fill in name of syntax here]" see yoast.com/yoast-seo-11-0/

Yep, trust me, I'm 100% on board. JSON-LD is so nice to work with.

This still requires you to parse JSON onto the HTML, no? Am I maybe just missing something?

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

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.

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…

If all you care about is SEO then do whatever Google says to do this year and you're fine. Today that's JSON-LD, tomorrow it's ???? I need to update this chart for 2020 but as we see, history keeps repeating itself. aaronparecki.com/2016/12/17/…

Unless I'm missing something, this chart is lacking 2017, 2018, 2019, as well as 2020. Google is strongly recommended JSON-LD usage today, and has been since 2016-ish. And there are a number of rich snippets that _only_ work as JSON-LD. developers.google.com/search…