I listened to Alex Barnetts podcast today about microformats today and really enjoyed it. I’d not really looked into the microformat idea until Marc Canters session he organised at Mix06 and even then left wondering what the big fuss was all about. Trying to get people to agree on standards in a community sounded like a breeding ground for arguments to me, but so far they seem to be doing a pretty good job. I thought I got what microformats were, but they just didn’t seem complicated enough to me for everyone to get excited about. But then I suppose many great things never are ie RSS, OPML etc…
I thought I’d quickly describe what I think microformats are, 1 to make sure I am getting it, and 2 to help anyone else who is struggling (I don’t think they make it too clear on the wiki – but then again I am sometimes a bit slow!)
So basically microformats are information that is structured so it can be easily read by a computer and a human.
To do this microformats are born to use xHTML. So with xHTML using normal html attributes such as titles and classes, you can store the machine readable information, while the human readable info goes into the innertext. The examples that are always good to use are hCards and hCalendar. Here’s my hCard:
Nick Swan
Dot Net Solutions
Royal Albert House, Sheet Street
Windsor,
Berks SL4 1EB
07866 567042
I created this using the hCard creator. You can see that this displays nicely as it’s well formatted xHTML. If I was to paste the xHTML directly into here however you can see:
<DIV class=vcard><A class="url fn" HREF="/nick">Nick Swan</A>
<DIV class=org>Dot Net Solutions</DIV>
<DIV class=adr>
<DIV class=street-address>Royal Albert House, Sheet Street</DIV><SPAN class=locality>Windsor</SPAN>, <SPAN class=region>Berks</SPAN> <SPAN class=postal-code>SL4 1EB</SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV class=tel>07866 567042</DIV></DIV>
So you can see how the class attributes of each div describes what the innertext value is going to be. Having this as human and machine readable means that spiders can now crawl the web and get this information, as well as people who are viewing it and want to contact me. Putting this information in a structured manner rather than a free text input allows you, or other people to do so much more with it. You can now retain the structure of your information as you pass it around, for a demo of this make sure you check out Ray Ozzies Live Clipboard.
So is there going to be a microformat for everything? Well accord to the podcast apparently not. The group mentioned that people must already be publishing data in an unstructured manner, and you must be able to show that the world would benefit from the data being represented in an microformat.
If I’ve got any of this wrong by the way please explain where I’m going wrong! Don’t worry about making me look stupid, I’d much rather someone just put me on the right tracks!
What is my interest in this? Attention microformats!
Interesting that in the podcast everybody seemed to brush off the topic of OPML when Alex mentioned it!!!
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