“Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards”
Microformats is a new XML/XHTML standard that looks like it might be really usefull. Microformats take established XML formats like hCard (contact info) and hCal (event info) and standardizing them in XHTML such that, first, humans can understand the data and, second, machines can parse the data. For those of you who read my blog and are interested in the semantic web (read: Paul), this is pretty interesting stuff. My view of the semantic web is that it is stuck the world of being an academic exercise. This project seems to humanize the semantic web and make it a whole lot more practical.
I’m also impressed that on the microformats site it mentions: “Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns”. It’s rare that you find open source projects were people admit that existing tools can have value and not reinvent the wheel every time.
Some links I found of interest:
- Microformats: What They Are and How To Use Them | Smashing Magazine. a pile of links to articles on the topic, basic explanations, and tools you can use.
- Firefox Plugin: Operator. finds microformat data on your current page and lets you work with it. For example, if it finds an address microformat in the page you can then click “Find in Google Maps”.
- Err The Blog: Microformathingies. Chris wrote a quick intro on how to use mofo, a ruby gem he wrote for working with microformats.
- InfoQ: Versatile RESTful APIs Beyond XML. how to setup Rails controllers which handle microformat mime types using mofo
It’s a shame they aren’t used more widely. I use XFN for the link list at the top of my site. For the page I made Sanaz I used an hCard for her contact details. Thing is, it doesn’t really do much of anything just yet, for the vast majority of people.
well, these things are bound to be chicken-and-egg problems until some killer app comes along or someone like google starts publishing shitloads of data in the formats.