This Fortnight in Microformats

A bumper round up of microformats from 4th–17th December 2006

New implementations

  • Alex Faaborg of Mozilla Labs has announced availability of ‘Operator’, a Firefox extension written by Michael Kaply at IBM (download from Firefox Add‑ons). Operator detects hCard, hCalendar, geo, hReview and rel-tag and allows you to combine those microformats with desktop applications and web services such as Google Maps and Yahoo! Calendar. Alex has also written some accompanying introductions to microformats and collected comments in mozilla.apps.dev.firefox.
  • Also for Firefox, the popular Tails extension has been updated to 0.3.6.
  • Nick Peters has written a Greasemonkey script called Social xFolk to highlight xFolk microformatted bookmarks. It appends ‘Add to Delicious’ and ‘Add to Magnolia’ buttons in the page.

On the Wiki

From uf-discuss

  • Ted Drake is interested to see if the recipes microformat brainstorming can move on with a request for real-world examples and experiments
  • With Mars and the Moon getting in the news, Andy Mabbett has redrawn attention to the Mars and Luna extensions to Geo.
  • Jason Garber asked about rel=”muse” in XFN, wanting a means to indicate professional respect towards a person, rather than ‘romantic’ respect. For clarification, that category of values in XFN is ‘romantic’ as-in ‘romanticism’, and are not intentionally restricted to love-interest.
  • Off the back this XFN discussion came discussion about a so-called ‘XPN’ (an ‘XHTML Professionals Network’ microformat). In response to this, there’s interest in identifying real-world implementations that could benefit by publishing professional relationships (think employee/employer, clients, sub-contractors and so forth). If you are involved with or know of sites that could harness such distributed professional networking, please get in touch on the list.
  • Taylor Cowan is looking for more semantic detail on Q&A mark-up; going beyond the humble definition list. As usual, real-world examples are collected on the wiki and discussion should take place on the list.

On the web

  • Following the healthy bloom of new cheat-sheets Brian Suda has updated his Microformats Cheatsheet PDF.
  • Roger L Costello has created a comprehensive hCard presentation (using S5). Not only does it provide an introduction to using hCard it also provides detail on use of class="value" for properties, and the flexibility enabled by an oft‑overlooked feature.

‘This week in microformats’ aims to highlight the most active microformats discussion published in the preceding week by monitoring the microformats discuss mailing list, and the microformats tag on Technorati (and elsewhere). If you’d like to alert the editors to something, add a ‘thisweekinmicroformats’ tag.

10 Responses to “This Fortnight in Microformats”

  1. Nate Koechley :

    I want to say Thank You for these roundups. For me, it’s an excellent and efficient way to stay up to date. Great job.

    thanks
    nate

    December 18th, 2006 at 7:06 pm

  2. Celso Martinho » Blog Archive » Microformats and Firefox :

    […] Microformats have been around for a while and increasingly receiving positive feedback and adoption. They’re known as “simple conventions for embedding semantic markup for a specific problem domain” but if I’d choose one word to define it, it would be simplicity. Today I found a post mentioning a two Firefox extensions (Operator and Tail) and one Greasemonkey script. If you’re microformats I urge you to try these. […]

    December 19th, 2006 at 5:01 am

  3. Herb :

    Many thanks for the Brian Suda link, although I found the whole of the round up most enlightening.

    January 18th, 2007 at 7:54 am

  4. Tobias :

    Yes, thank so much for these summaries. I really want to stay updated on microformats and this is the only way I can!
    Keep it up!

    February 2nd, 2007 at 12:06 pm

  5. Microformat Round-Ups - flying sparks :

    […] Gerade in der letzten der drei ersten round-ups wird von ein paar interessanten Neuerungen (Plugins) und Artikeln gesprochen. […]

    February 2nd, 2007 at 12:14 pm

  6. microformateurs » Blog Archive » cette dernière quinzaine en microformats :

    […] Traduction d’un billet de Ben Ward. […]

    April 11th, 2007 at 1:02 am

  7. findallabout.com :

    This PDF report from Brian Suda has updated his Microformats Cheatsheet PDF. Cheat Sheets should not be missed if you are at all serious about microformat’s it. It is the best quick reference on the subject.

    May 13th, 2007 at 11:49 pm

  8. ritzenhoff :

    What I’m really waiting for is a microformat for products and shopping sites. I think such a format could rely on standards like BMEcat.

    August 5th, 2007 at 10:43 am

  9. Phoenix :

    Any progress in developing microformats for shopping products? We would appreciate this a lot!

    September 10th, 2007 at 1:32 am

  10. Ben Ward :

    Regarding products:

    There is a stable draft of hListing, which can be used for listing products _for sale_ on a site. There has also been brainstorming and discussion about extending that into a real ‘product’ microformat.

    The only way these things get done though is if people contribute. No-one works on these full time, so the more people we have to stimulate interest in formats the better things work. Head over to Discuss and sign up for the -discuss list to talk about existing microformats and how best to implement them, and the -new list to talk about new formats. Also, if you have time to contribute, you’ll want to have a quick read of The Process too.

    Thanks,

    Ben

    October 7th, 2007 at 3:27 am