Microformats

Today I was talking at Cognifide about Microformats. And here is a little summary of what I have said.

Microformats are attempts of formating web data using existing markup of XHTML. This is done as wikipedia says: “to allow information intended for end-users (such as contact information, geographic coordinates, calendar events, and the like) to also be automatically processed by software.”

These little bits of HTML markup  are meant to be both “presentable and parsable” meaning that they add to the presentation layer (more meaningful markup) and allow all kinds of screen scrapers to parse the displayed data. Microformats are kept as simple as possible and solve a specific tasks like modeling reviews, contacts or events. 

So how does such a microformat look like? Here is a quick example of a hCard microfromat that models a vCard standard for creating contacts in various address book software.

<div class=“vcard”>
   <div class=“fn”>Joe Doe</div>
   <div class=“org”>The Example Company</div>
   <div class=“tel”>604-555-1234</div>
   <a class=“url” href=“http://example.com/”>http://example.com/</a>
</div>

Do you see those little class=”something” markup elements? Those are parts of microformat that is specified with a top class=”vcard”. This way instead of a simple paragraph with a text that just so happens to be someone’s contact information we provide meaningful markup that can be parsed by all kinds of software. For instance Tails - a Firefox plugin can extract it and add it to your Address Book or gMail contacts.

So why is it cool to use microformats? For one they provide better more meaningful markup. They add semantic meaning to your HTML code. Applying microformats to your existing HTML is quite easy as only markup has to change and not the underlaying data model. And as a final argument - microformats with just a little effort do implement provide a considerable value: you bring semantic web to your site, you add better quality markup and increase usability of your site. A win-win situation.

For all interested in my talk today at Cognifide, here is my presentation on microformats for you to check out.