How to split itemscope over multiple HTML elements?

Question

I have the following HTML:

<body itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/WebPage">
  <header itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/WPHeader">
    <nav itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/SiteNavigationElement">
    </nav>
    ...
    <div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization" itemref="objectDetails">
      <span itemprop="name">Org name</span><br>
      <span itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress">
        ...
      </span>
    </div>
  </header>
  <ul itemprop="breadcrumb" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/BreadcrumbList">
    <li itemprop="itemListElement" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ListItem">..</li>
    ...
  </ul>
  <div id="objectDetails">
    <div itemprop="description">...</div>
    <div itemprop="foundingDate">...</div>
    ...
  </div>
</body>

This web page displays information about one particular organization. Some information about organization should be displayed in a page header, other - in the center of a page. With the help of itemref attribute I can split information about organization and put it on two separate divs.

If I test the above HTML with google structured data testing tool - it extracts info about organization correctly - properties from both divs are shown, but it shows validation error on a WebPage object:

The property foundingDate is not recognized by Google for an object of type WebPage.

What is the correct way to tell Google that properties that are inside objectDetails div doesn't belong to the outer itemscope (WebPage)? If I add itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization" to objectDetails div - then Google sees two separate organizations on my WebPage.

Can you maybe work around the problem by keeping the data grouped together according to its logical structure – and use formatting (such as absolute positioning for example) to get it to show up where you want it visually? — CBroe, Mar 19 '15 at 01:05

score 2 · Answer 1 · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

This is not possible.

Possible "solutions":

Don’t use an item on a "container" like html or body. Use it on an element that doesn’t span the whole content, and use itemref if needed.
Use multiple items and specify the same URI in itemid for them. However, it’s not clear if/when/how Schema.org supports itemid, and support from consumers is probably bad.

(Using RDFa instead of Microdata would allow this naturally.)
Add an untyped item (by adding an itemscope without itemtype) to the element containing all properties you don’t want to add to the original parent item. Examples: 1, 2, 3.

How to split itemscope over multiple HTML elements?

1 Answers1

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