HTML5 microdata: span content?

Question

I have read the HTML5 specification, the microdata specification, and the WHATWG HTML5 (with microdata) specification. These are well written and easy to understand.

Answer 1

(Sorry, I didn't have enough reputation to post a comment.)

We're at the end of 2017 now. Somehow, the MDN webdocs (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_attributes/itemprop) and the schema docs (http://schema.org/telephone) still propose to use a content attribute on span using microdata. No html5 validator will accept this of course.

Answer 2

Yes, this is wrong. Neither Microdata nor HTML5 define a content attribute for the span element.

Several people wanted to use it, see for example the code in these questions:

• Hide Microdata property value in 'content' attribute?
• Categories for Product in schema.org?
• Is the "content" attribute valid for the <span> tag > if so is it a good practice?
• schema.org product availability tags markup

I’m not sure where exactly this confusion is coming from.

(It doesn’t help that Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool incorrectly uses the content attribute instead of the element content; but at least all other Microdata parsers seem to do it correctly.)

Maybe some people got confused because RDFa (but not Microdata) defines and allows the content attribute for span. See HTML+RDFa’s Extensions to the HTML5 Syntax:

For the avoidance of doubt, the following RDFa attributes are allowed on all elements in the HTML5 content model: @vocab, @typeof, @property, @resource, @prefix, @content, @about, @rel, @rev, @datatype, and @inlist.