Which microformat vocabularies does Bing document for structured content?

Definition: Microformat vocabularies are named HTML conventions for expressing structured content. In Bing's structured data documentation, the Microformats support column lists hCard for businesses and organizations and people, hCalendar for events, hProduct for products and offers, hRecipe for recipes, hReview for reviews, and hReview-Aggregate for aggregated reviews.

Key facts

• Bing lists Microformats among its supported structured content specifications, alongside Schema.org, RDFa and Open Graph. Bing's structured data documentation calls the relevant column “Microformats support”.
• The table maps hCard to businesses and organizations and to people.
• It maps hCalendar to events, hProduct to products and offers, and hRecipe to recipes.
• It maps hReview to reviews and hReview-Aggregate to aggregated reviews.

What does Bing's support table document?

Bing presents support by scenario and by annotation format. Its table has separate columns for Microdata support, Microformats support and RDFa support. The row for products and offers records Yes (hProduct) under Microformats and No under RDFa. The rows for businesses and organizations, events, people, recipes and reviews record Yes under RDFa as well as a named microformat.

The table also has a separate row for aggregated reviews. That row names hReview-Aggregate, while the ordinary reviews row names hReview. A page about a review scenario therefore needs the correct row when you are identifying which vocabulary Bing documents.

What do hCard and hCalendar describe?

The Microformats Wiki defines hCard as an open format for publishing people, companies and organizations in HTML. It describes hCard as a 1:1 representation of vCard RFC2426 properties and values. The page identifies vcard as the root class and lists fn as the formatted or full name property.

The same reference defines hCalendar as an open format for publishing events in HTML. It describes a 1:1 representation of iCalendar RFC2445 VEVENT properties and values. Its example uses the vevent root class with summary, dtstart and location properties:

<span class="vevent">
  <span class="summary">The microformats.org site was launched</span> on
  <span class="dtstart">2005-06-20</span> at the Supernova Conference in
  <span class="location">San Francisco, CA, USA</span>.
</span>

How should you read hProduct, hRecipe and the review rows?

Bing's table uses hProduct as the Microformats label for the products and offers scenario. It uses hRecipe for recipes. For reviews, it distinguishes an individual review from an aggregated review through hReview and hReview-Aggregate. These labels identify the vocabulary shown in the support table; the table itself is organised by scenario and format rather than by a full property reference.

The table is a support map, so it does not give a complete implementation recipe for each vocabulary. Bing's documentation says that its crawlers validate annotations against the selected format's schema and data types. It gives an event without a date and a person without a name as examples of annotations that will be ignored.

What does this change for a website?

Bing says annotations leave the visible content unchanged while giving it information about the type of content hosted on a site. The documentation also says that Bing crawlers process the annotations when they next visit the page. Its support table therefore tells you which named microformat Bing documents for each listed scenario, while the surrounding page explains that validation and page context remain part of processing.

Related terms

• Structured data
• Microdata
• Product structured data
• Review structured data

FAQ

Does Bing document hCard for people?

Yes. Bing's table lists Yes (hCard) for both people and businesses and organizations.

Which review vocabulary appears for aggregated reviews?

Bing lists hReview-Aggregate for the aggregated reviews row and hReview for the reviews row.

Does this table list every property needed for each vocabulary?

No. It is a scenario and format support table. Bing's page separately describes validation against the selected format and its data types.

Sources

1. Bing Webmaster Tools, "Marking up your site: Overview", no date shown
2. Microformats Wiki, "hCard 1.0", no date shown
3. Microformats Wiki, "hCalendar 1.0", no date shown

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