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/…

What Google sayx. And Bing. And Yahoo. And Yandex. But if all you care about is SEO by all means use what you perceive as the flavor of the day. But if you also care about a robust, developer-friendly, serialization format for linked data then JSON-LD is there for you.