With the news that Yahoo! fully supports microformats, there are undoubtedly a few questions from the not-so-techy web user. Having had the chance to briefly speak with Tantek about microformats at BarCamp SF this past summer, I can help to clear any misconceptions. If you remember or use vCards, dubbed the electronic business card, you might be familiar with the microformats concept.
Microformats help people find information faster as well as easily manipulate and archive that information. For example, if you go to Yahoo! Local and track down a restaurant, you can view the microformat hCard for that restaurant which may include information such as name, address and possibly hours of operation. Microformats can be embedded into any site and are simple HTML-based data formats – it’s not an entirely new language or anything.
With the help of microformats in the near future, it will be possible to download an hCard for a restaurant, sync it to your cell phone and have it automatically find directions for you. This is the type of application that microformats allow for. I was about to go in-depth about how to integrate microformats into your site but John Allsopp wrote an excellent piece about microformats on the web development site Think Vitamin.
There are many types of microformats in addition to the hCard. Yahoo! Tech makes use of hReview for their reviews while others are utilizing hResume on their websites.
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Thanks for the nice comments Paul. Also, some further detail and more microformats related posts at my new microformats blog Microformatique
john
I have the sneaky feeling that we’ll be hearing more and more about microformats in the future. Personally, I’m playing catch-up, trying to understand it all.
<verb>Makes</verb>
<noun>sense</noun>
<preposition>to</preposition>
<pronoun>me</pronoun>
Many folk likely use rel=”tag”, rel=”nofollow”, and rel=”license” without relaising they are microformats.
Microformats are a good thing, I just hope they don’t over-do it where at the end everyone has the same standard xhtml.
Now might be a good time to mention the Tails Firefox extension, too.
Finally I have a basic understanding of microformats! I have heard the term being banded about a lot on the likes of Inside the Net and TWiT, but have remained confused. From what I know, I think it’s a subject everyone should keep an eye on over the coming year.