Microformats - Cacheing In On the Semantic Web
During our time at Web Design World Boston we were introduced to some really exciting web technologies. Most thrilling for me though was the concept of Microformats. Microformats are basically a standardized markup naming convention that allows data to be shared across multiple platforms without any back-end programming necessary. All it takes is some plain old semantic HTML (POSH) and a little extra attention to class and id names. For instance, this HTML…
automatically converts my contact information into an hCard which can be read by spiders and aggregators as a downloadable vCard simply due to the way I named my containing elements. How cool is that?!?!
There are dozens of uses for Microformats. Beyond hCard there is hCalendar (a date/time based Microformat), VoteLinks (for polls and statistics), hReview (for reviews - think Amazon), XFN (Xhtml Friends Network), rel-license (for indicating content licenses), rel-tag (for tagging links), and XOXO (for lists and outlines). These open standards make “web 2.0″ functionality available to designers who can’t write complex code. If you’re a designer/front-end developer who is already writing clean, semantic markup there’s no reason not to take advantage of them.
I have to credit the very funny and always entertaining Dan Cedarholm with piquing my curiosity during his lecture at WDW. Dan was a great speaker and the highlight of the conference for me.
Some great resources on Microformats:
Microformats.org - Includes a great code generator
Brian Suda - Creator of the Microformats Cheat Sheet
The Wiki - Great resource for learning about all the open standards
The Operator Firefox Extension - Allows you to examine all Microformats on a page