html - Microdata on tables

Question

I’m new to Microdata and have a problem with itemscope within a table.

For example assume I‘ve got a person object and in the table I’m showing Name, Street and City columns.

<table>
  <tr itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
    <td itemprop="name">Name</td>
    <td itemprop="streetAddress">123 main</td>
    <td itemprop="addressCountry">USA</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Note that the streetAddress and addressCountry are supposed to be children of an address property. Yet you can not add a parent div to group those within the table.

Further it doesn't appear that dot notation works, e.g. address.streetAddress.

How would one support this?

Answer 1

There are only rather ugly solutions for this.

You could use the itemref attribute for the country, but you’d have to add a dummy untyped itemscope so that the addressCountry property doesn’t get added to the Person item:

<table>
  <tr itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
    <td itemprop="name">
      Name
    </td>
    <td itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress" itemref="country">
      <span itemprop="streetAddress">123 main</span>
    </td>
    <td itemscope>
      <span itemprop="addressCountry" id="country">USA</span>
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>

You could use itemref for almost anything, so that you don’t have to add a dummy itemscope, but the markup gets more complex, and you have to "outsource" the Person item:

<meta itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person" itemref="person-name person-address" />

<!-- can’t have this as descendant of another Microdata item -->

<table>
  <tr>
    <td itemprop="name" id="person-name">
      Name
    </td>
    <td itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress" id="person-address" itemref="address-country">
      <span itemprop="streetAddress">123 main</span>
    </td>
    <td itemprop="addressCountry" id="address-country">
      USA
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>

Or still have Person in the table by adding it to the first td:

<!-- can’t have this as descendant of another Microdata item -->

<table>
  <tr>
    <td itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person" itemref="person-address">
      <span itemprop="name">Name</span>
    </td>
    <td itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress" id="person-address" itemref="address-country">
      <span itemprop="streetAddress">123 main</span>
    </td>
    <td itemprop="addressCountry" id="address-country">
      USA
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>