‘This Week in Microformats’ is a summary of notable microformats activity from the mailing lists, wiki, events and the wider web.

On the µf-Discuss mailing list

• Lots of discussion this week about standardising the representation of hCard in JSON. Currently parsers tend to produce sensible but subtly different objects, this is an effort to make it all interoperable. There’s a wiki page and discussions: Standardized Representation of Microformats in JSON and jCard draft.

On the web

• David Jane’s Almost Universal Microformats Parser — written in Python — has been restored to the internet and the project is now hosted publicly on Google Code.
• ReadWriteWeb responds to Yahoo’s hListing deployment. Nestoria have also added hListing support.
• Recordings from SGFooCamp have emerged:
  • Jeremy Keith talked about the password anti-pattern.
  • Leslie Chicoine talks about the challenges of user-interface design, especially with respect to social-network-portability, and discusses what a user should or should not need to know about OpenID, and Satisfaction’s hCard implementation.
  • Tantek Çelik spoke about the origins of XFN, hCard, and hCalendar as well as the need to focus on benefitting the user with improvements in user-interface.
• HubSpot have published a good introduction to working with microformats in Microformats: Inbound Marketing or Computers!.
• SemanticReport interviews Steve Ganz of LinkedIn about the upper and lower-case semantic web and their use of microformats (XFN, hCard, hResume, hCalendar, and hReview.)
• MicroReviews is a Twitter bot that takes posts and republishes them with hReview.

Face-to-Face Events

• San Diego Web Standards Group launch with focus including microformats.
• Announcing Open Web Vancouver 2008 – Apr/14+15 @ Canada Place, Microformats talks include: Microformats and Distributed Social Networks by Chris Messina, Microformats with Ryan King and more…
• Announcing the Microformats vEvent during London Web Week, 27th May 2008.

This weeks’s bulletin was put together with contributions from Frances Berriman, Toby Inkster, Tantek Çelik, Gerald Bauer, David Janes and Brian Suda. To contribute to the next issue, please edit the wiki page. Thanks!

‘This Week in Microformats’ is a summary of notable microformats activity from the mailing lists, wiki, events and the wider web.

On the wiki

• New profiles have been produced for more microformats. These can be optionally placed in the head element of a page to indicate the use of particular microformats.
• We’ve reorganised the wiki todo list, so it should be clearer to see what we’re all working towards. 

On the µf-Discuss mailing list

• There’s a call for speakers on microformats for the Open Web 2008 Conference in Vancouver on April 14th/15th

On the µf-New mailing list

• Work on hListing is going to resume shortly — Anyone interesting in marking up listings for classifieds and product listings

On the web

• Cognition 0.1α6 has been been released. — A new parser for metadata embedded in HTML, written in Perl and licensed under the GPL v3.
• What is the Semantic Web? What’s Web 3.0? What are Microformats? Why do Microformats matter? — The “pragmatic” semantic web proposes – let’s just use conventions and best practices for today’s web markup and today’s browsers. Let’s add semantics using Microformats to the event example.
• Mofo – Getting Started w/ Microformats using Ruby – Web 3.0 In Action — Let’s load up the event listing web page for the Ruby on Rails Workshop on the Yahoo! Upcoming service using mofo – a microformat parser in Ruby.
• On YDN there’s an article on the Kelkoo deployment of hListing and using hKit to consume the microformat into a blog listings widget.

This fortnight’s bulletin was put together with contributions from Frances Berriman, Toby Inkster, Tantek Çelik and Gerald Bauer. To contribute to the next issue, please edit the this-week-2008-03-31 wiki page. Thanks!