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…

Yes, read the linked post, it's from 2016

This implies schema.org is invented by Google; it isn't. "Since April 2015, the W3C Schema.org Community Group is the main forum for schema collaboration, and provides the public-schemaorg@w3.org mailing list for discussions." schema.org/docs/about.html

Literally on schema.org... "Founded by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex..." and look at the names on their about page too. Even if it's not created exclusively by them (which I never said), that looks an awful lot like an oligopoly to me anyway.

Correct, but spun off as a neutral standard, as has happened for many of the technologies that we're using today. Regardless, Google is consuming only JSON-LD going forward for some types of structured data, so it'll end up being a choice you have to make at some point.

Like I said already, only if you care about SEO. If SEO is your goal, you do what Google says. There's plenty of uses of structured data outside of that (including the tools that I use to read and post to Twitter) which are easier done using Microformats

"Do what Google says" means we should all build shitty AMP sites, too.