Using the link tag instead of the meta tag in semantic markup when the value is a URL
html, semantic-markup
Solution
On the page for the type `http://schema.org/VideoObject` you can find the "Expected Type" for each property.
For `url` and `embedURL` it says: "URL".
If you want to provide a URL in HTML5, you have to use the `href` attribute (on `link`, `a`, …), the `src` attribute (`img`, …), or any other ways that are defined.
If you use a URL as value of the `content` attribute of a `meta` element, it will represent a string (looking like a URL), not a URL.
You can find the relevant part in the Microdata spec, 5.4 Values.
Problem
I was looking at YouTube's HTML source code for video pages and saw these tags: ``` <div id="watch7-container" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/VideoObject"> <link itemprop="url" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikbEBp5BeCM"> <meta itemprop="name" content="THE TEST"> <meta itemprop="duration" content="PT1M10S"> <meta itemprop="unlisted" content="False"> <link itemprop="embedURL" href="http://www.youtube.com/v/ikbEBp5BeCM?autohide=1&version=3"> <meta itemprop="playerType" content="Flash"> <meta itemprop="width" content="640"> <meta itemprop="height" content="480"> ``` Every time the value is a URL, YouTube uses the `link` tag instead of the `meta` tag. http://validator.w3.org/ validated both `<meta content="http://..." itemprop="url">` and `<link href="http://..." itemprop="url">` as being valid HTML. What is the benefit of doing this?