Recent developments in microdata publishing support in Views/Panels and Google Summer of Code's support for microdata publishing in contrib field formatters are helping push the Microdata module closer to release.

On June 2, the big three search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) announced Schema.org, which helps them show search results in a more useful way. The announcement has gotten people really interested in inline structured data such as microdata and RDFa.

This screencast shows how you can use the microdata module to place Schema.org terms. This is an early preview—very few field formatters have microdata support at this time and the module is still changing quite a bit—but I thought people might be interested in the direction the module is heading.

Interest in microdata has been on the rise since the schema.org announcement in June.

I had fortunately already been looking at the microdata spec and thinking about how the work to get RDFa output in core could be repurposed for microdata, so I started a project that day.

Since microdata is based on RDFa, there is a lot that can be repurposed. But as I noted in my last post on the subject, there are also small differences between the specs... and in some cases, these small differences have a big impact.

We need to start thinking about those impacts.

There is a lot of confusion around HTML5 and RDFa, both in the Drupal community and outside of it. That’s why I decided to redevelop my site in Drupal 7 with HTML5, using a base theme available on Drupal.org, to see for myself what it's like using HTML5 and RDFa together.

HTML5 is the incontestable future of the Web, and it is becoming more and more clear that inline structured data is also going to be a fundamental part of the future Web... and, with the current core support for RDFa and the future core support for HTML5, Drupal has an interest in both.

Much is made over the tree vs. graph distinction in discussions about microdata. It recently came up again in the comments to Manu Sporny's Uber-comparison of RDFa and microdata.

My question is... is it an either/or kind of a situation? I'm interested in other people's opinions on this, but it seems to me microdata could be characterized as something like tree-default / graph-optional, while RDF is graph enforced.