So, I was reading about microdata and rich snippets for Google and it sounded like a great SEO thing. Making your reviews more easily found, especially from people who are specifically looking for reviews. All good stuff.

Rich snippets, though. Are they just a Google thing? Does it matter if they are? In any case, a peek at rich snippets immediately brings up the microformat, RDFa, microdata confusion. I draw from this post that RDFa is more extensible, but microdata is simpler and still does the job. Microformats appear to be reviled.

Now, I’m a ground level web content kinda gal, and I don’t read international standards committee deliberations, nor do I participate in the nuts and bolts designs and debates. I wait to see what has been decided and what has been implemented and supported by the browsers and relevant technologies.

Further down the rabbit hole was a more detailed and technical article that makes several strong points about standards and separation of intention and the dangers of kludging stuff together, standards bloat and… Which muddied the waters for me for a few moments until I remembered that microdata, RDFa and microformats can all coexist in the same document. So if you can use a simpler markup for a common vocabulary and build your own extensible framework as needed from RDFa plus with support for all 3 from Google, the answer at this juncture seems pretty clear.

Use microdata for the simple and common things it is defined for and if you get into more complex territory, then use RDFa.