Assigning Itemscope Attribute a Value in Rich Snippet

Question

So we are using some rich snippets and they use the html5 markup scheme.

Our problem is the itemscope attribute doesn't have a value.

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/LocalBusiness">

This cause our old products html validation to fail because it thinks it's an empty tag. Does google and markup rules work the same if you assign it a value of 1 like so.

<div itemscope="1" itemtype="http://schema.org/LocalBusiness">

It's a work around for now until we can properly update our validation methods but that is a farther out project.

So basically is there a proper syntax to make this still valid for Googles Rich Snippet rules, html5 and older validation engines prior to html5?

Answer 1

(This answer is basically copied from Peter Murray, specifically these two comments.)

The HTML5 spec allows for boolean attributes with a value of an empty string or the attribute name:

If the attribute is present, its value must either be the empty string or a value that is an ASCII case-insensitive match for the attribute's canonical name, with no leading or trailing whitespace.

So either this:

<div itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/LocalBusiness">

or this:

<div itemscope="itemscope" itemtype="http://schema.org/LocalBusiness">

is valid HTML5.

To be sure that Google recognizes itemscope="itemscope" correctly, he (Peter Murray) created an example page and ran it through Google's rich snippet validator. From the results, you can see that Google picked up the data (an Event item) correctly.