I'm trying to learn how Microdata works and I was looking at the Schema.org website and I kinda get how the basics works because you can find some outlined examples online of the Navigations, Headers, Sidebars and Footers - but I don't understand what properties you can use with more complex item types.
Let's say I have an About page on my site. Nothing fancy, you just talk about your business but there is a item type http://schema.org/AboutPage you can use. So I visit that link but to be honest everything you see at that page isn't really written down for beginners I think.
Am I allowed to use all the item properties listed on that specific page or only the the selected few in the Thing section at the bottom of the page because the above two sections are part of WebPage and CreativeWork? I don't have the CreativeWork item type on my page, just the WebPage attached to my HTML body tag.
I always thought you could use those item types as snippets in your HTML to wrap pieces of HTML content together and you didn't need to work with an inherited workflow. Going from wrapped content inside WebPage → CreativeWork → AboutPage item types.
How to find the items types and which properties you can use within them?
First note, you can’t use the vocabulary Schema.org with Microformats. You probably confused it with Microdata, which is one of three syntaxes the Schema.org partners support (the other two are JSON-LD and RDFa). (I edited your question accordingly.)
You may use all properties that are listed on a type’s page.
A type in Schema.org always inherits from all its parent types, up to Thing. So, for example, the type AboutPage is also a WebPage, which is also a CreativeWork, which is also a Thing. You just have to use the most specific type that applies in your case.
For finding appropriate types, simply start at Thing and check the "More specific Types", linked on that page. And repeat.
Another way would be to search for some related keywords on the list of all types and check if a suitable type exists.
The problem is if you're unfamiliar with XML and Schemas because schema.org is as friendly as they can be without actually giving more examples of it, simply because stuff like this is indeed complex to make generic enough to reuse, while verbose enough to explain.
However there are some Google tools which can help you learn:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-helper
https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/
And register for Google Webmaster Tools account, and use their data highlighter and test.
Use that in combination with the schema.org examples and definitions, and then you'll properly relatively fast start learning which tags to use and how to nest them.
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29747902/am-i-allowed-to-use-properties-from-thing-creativework-webpage-for-an-aboutpage