It almost went unnoticed but on April 6th, Schema.org added a TechArticle schema, child of the normal Article schema, with a “child” schema of its own, the APIReference schema.
TechArticle comes with two new properties:
- dependencies – Prerequisites needed to fulfill steps in article
- proficiencyLevel – Proficiency needed for this content; expected values: ‘Beginner’, ‘Expert’.
APIReference comes with four properties:
- assembly – Text Library file name e.g., mscorlib.dll, system.web.dll
- assemblyVersion – Text Associated product/technology version. e.g., .NET Framework 4.5
- programmingModel – Text Indicates whether API is managed or unmanaged.
- targetPlatform – Text Type of app development: phone, Metro style, desktop, XBox, etc.
These could prove quite useful, I think especially the proficiencyLevel property is a great thing to have standardized, but to be honest I’d appreciate it a bit more if they had allowed for a few more values than just “Beginner” and “Expert”. Even a third “Intermediate” value would have made it more usable.
Neither of the schema’s come with any examples, so if you have examples of either of these in the wild I’d love to know. I think it’s fair to say that one would expect the schema.org pages to be marked up with the TechArticle schema, but they’re not….
Schema.org news 