I recently converted an old site from xhtml to html5 and am now thinking about converting some other sites too, since I plan to keep these sites for many years to come, and think html5 might be better for the long term.
I want to use elements such as <article>, <section> and <nav> on my new html5 pages, because they might help search engines understand the structure better. But I've found out that Schema.org has some tags that seem to have the same function. For example, compare:
<article> vs. <div itemscope="itemscope" itemtype="http://schema.org/Article">
and
<nav> vs. <div itemscope="itemscope" itemtype="http://schema.org/SiteNavigationElement">
I haven't studied the use of Schema.org tags in detail yet, but it appears that some of them have the same meaning, or approximate meaning, as the corresponding html5 tags.
So my question is, should I choose one or the other, or use both. I prefer the html tags because the schema.org tags are clumsy and bloated.
It has also occurred to me that the two types might be combined as follows:
<article itemscope="itemscope" itemtype="http://schema.org/Article">
and
<nav itemscope="itemscope" itemtype="http://schema.org/SiteNavigationElement">
Does anyone have any advice or opinions about the best way to use these tags?
thank you
