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April 7, 2026

Structured data and accessibility, on by default

By Phil Scott

Three things a content site should do for its readers are now handled by the DocSite and BlogSite templates: structured data for search engines, accessibility landmarks for keyboard and screen-reader users, and font preloading to reduce the flash of unstyled text.

Structured data, so search engines understand your pages

Search engines read HTML, but they reward pages that tell them what they're looking at. Pennington emits schema.org JSON-LD as a <script> tag in every page's head. The DocSite template wires Article, BreadcrumbList, and WebSite automatically; the BlogSite template wires Article and WebSite:

html 
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Article",
  "headline": "Introducing Pennington",
  "datePublished": "2026-04-04",
  "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Phil Scott" }
}
</script>

That's what powers rich results — the breadcrumb trails and article cards in search listings. It needs one thing: an absolute base URL. Set CanonicalBaseUrl and the JSON-LD appears; leave it unset and Pennington skips it rather than emit broken relative links. See hosting under a base URL.

The framework ships only one type — JsonLdEntity. Templates own the concrete records they emit, and you can add your own for any schema.org type the templates don't cover. Subclass JsonLdEntity, attribute your fields with [JsonPropertyName], and pass the entity to <StructuredData Entities="...">. Pennington serializes it through the same path as the built-in types. See Add a custom schema.org JSON-LD type for a worked JsonLdRecipe example.

Accessibility landmarks

Pennington pages ship visually-hidden skip links so keyboard users can jump past navigation straight to the content. The sidebar is a real <nav> element with an aria-label, the header and footer navs are labeled too, and the main content carries id="main-content" as the skip-link target.

None of this is configurable — these landmarks are wired up by default, so the skip link and labels are there from the first page render rather than something you have to remember to add.

Font preloading

Custom fonts load after the browser parses your stylesheet, which means a beat of fallback text before the real typeface swaps in. A preload hint tells the browser to fetch the font earlier. Pass a FontPreload[] to DocSiteOptions.FontPreloads and Pennington emits the <link rel="preload"> tags ahead of the stylesheet:

csharp 
new DocSiteOptions
{
    FontPreloads =
    [
        new FontPreload("/fonts/body.woff2"),
        new FontPreload("/fonts/display.woff2"),
    ],
};

The font how-to covers the full setup, including the @font-face rules.

seoaccessibilitystructured-data