Context
There is a petition to upgrade microformats to v2 in the core. Instead of continuing to support microformats, which rely on CSS classes, they should be completely removed from the core as bloat. There are several reasons for this:
- This is plugin and theme territory and is usually handled by either an SEO plugin, a dedicated schema plugin, and theme developers implement their own markup.
- Google prefers JSON-LD:
-
The markup is not interleaved with the user-visible text, which makes nested data items easier to express, such as the
Country
of aPostalAddress
of aMusicVenue
of anEvent
. Also, Google can read JSON-LD data when it is dynamically injected into the page’s contents, such as by JavaScript code or embedded widgets in your content management system.
-
- Fewer things to support. What if microformats v3 comes out? Do we upgrade again? Google still supports microformats, but it is slowly removing support for older formats. Recently, they stopped supporting data-vocabulary*org. At some point, they will stop supporting microformats v1. This means we either need to upgrade it or, better, remove it and let plugins/theme handle it.
If removal is not an option, we should consider upgrading microformats to v2.
Possible implementation
Removal of microformats support from the core. There are a couple of options:
- Introduce a filter to disable microformats in a minor version.
- At some point, introduce a filter to enable microformats support (or core plugin) in a major version.
- If we’re not worried about backward compatibility, it can be removed in a major version without filters. A core plugin would probably be a good idea just in case anyone needs it.
Will you be able to help with the implementation?
Will help with testing.