itemref (attribute)

Properties that are not descendants of an element with the itemscope attribute can be associated with an item using the global attribute itemref.

itemref provides a list of element IDs (not itemids) elsewhere in the document, with additional properties

The itemref attribute can only be specified on elements that have an itemscope attribute specified.

Note: the itemref attribute is not part of the microdata data model. It is merely a syntactic construct to aid authors in adding annotations to pages where the data to be annotated does not follow a convenient tree structure. For example, it allows authors to mark up data in a table so that each column defines a separate item while keeping the properties in the cells.

Example

HTML

<div itemscope id="amanda" itemref="a b"></div>
<p id="a">Name: <span itemprop="name">Amanda</span> </p>
<div id="b" itemprop="band" itemscope itemref="c"></div>
<div id="c">
    <p>Band: <span itemprop="name">Jazz Band</span> </p>
    <p>Size: <span itemprop="size">12</span> players</p>
</div>

Structured data

(in JSON-LD format)

{
  "@id": "amanda",
  "name": "Amanda",
  "band": {
    "@id": "b",
    "name": "Jazz Band",
    "size": 12
  }
}

Result

Specifications

Browser compatibilityUpdate compatibility data on GitHub

See also

• Other different global attributes
• Other, microdata related, global attributes:
  • itemid
  • itemprop
  • itemref
  • itemscope
  • itemtype