The recent microformats momentum from the introduction of the value-class-pattern and Google & Yelp’s support continues with the launch of Yahoo Placemaker™, an update to Optimus, the open source microformats validator, and a browser button that makes it easy to one-click validate your microformats.
Yahoo Placemaker Beta supports geo and adr microformats
Congratulations to Yahoo on their recent launch of Yahoo Placemaker™ Beta! Yahoo Placemaker extracts locations marked up with the geo and adr microformats from web pages. See the Yahoo Placemaker documentation for details.
Optimus updated to v0.8 and supports value-title
Optimus, the open source microformats transformer that also happens to do an excellent job as a validator, has been updated to version 0.8.
Optimus v0.8 supports the recently developed value-class-pattern’s “value-title” functionality. Optimus now also has its own twitter account that you can follow, @optimusmf. For microupdates on microformats in general, follow the @microformats twitter.
Get the Optimus microformats validator browser button
It’s hard to believe some of the first validation browser buttons* (for HTML, CSS, and links) were written over ten years ago, and now there’s one more:
> Optimus microformats validator
In most browsers, simply drag and drop the above “> Optimus microformats validator” link to your “Links Toolbar” / “Bookmarks Bar” / “Favorites Bar”. The Technorati Browser Buttons page has good additional installation instructions for browser buttons for various browsers.
Then go to any of your pages with microformats, click the newly created “> Optimus microformats validator” button in your browser toolbar, and read the validator report for suggested fixes and improvements to your microformats markup.
With both Google and Yahoo now indexing microformats like hCard and hReview, use the Optimus microformats validator to debug your microformats. Additional tools can be found on the debugging tools page.
*Browser buttons were originally called bookmarklets or favelets. However, Google’s documentation calls them “Browser Buttons” which sounds much friendlier and free of tech-jargon origins.
‘This Week in Microformats’ is a summary of notable microformats activity from the mailing lists, wiki, events and the wider web.
- Din Neville has been working hard this week, updating the Russian translation of the wiki. Thank you, Din.
- datetime-design-pattern contains documentation and discussion of alternative patterns to represent dates and times.
- The parsers page has fallen a little out of date. If you’d like to help update it with links to current available parsers, please help!
- There’s a new html5 page to track changes in HTML5 which will affect microformats (both positive and negative). Not that these issues don’t affect parsing now, and won’t do until HTML5 is stable.
Discuss and Dev have been very busy with discussion around the abbr datetime pattern, there’s a lot of it and the threads cross over quite a lot. The core of these discussions should be documented on the wiki on the aforementioned page over the course of this week. The main threads are in the archive page for µf-dev and the archive page for µf-discuss
Other discussions:
On the web
Elsewhere
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.
- We’ve documented machine data usage in microformats (date and time formats, geographic locations, keywords in certain formats). The page is a quick reference for all the formats we specify, the all the current supported methods on how to embed data alongside your own text, in an HTML valid manner.
- Discussion off the back of the BBC’s request for help learning about screen reader usage.
On the web
- The BBC are asking for help in finding out how people use screen reader applications to read web pages aloud; critically, whether they have them set to always read the
title attribute of abbreviation elements. Please give them some feedback if you can, it helps improve the information we have to work with on future patterns.
- Martin McEvoy has released TransFormr:
A Simple set of XSLT and PHP tools for Transforming Microformats
. (“Read Martin’s introduction from µf-discuss”)
- Hi5 have added hCard and XFN support to their friends lists.
- Mahalo have added microformats to their search result pages.
- Toluu have added an hCard-based profile import function to their sign-up process.
In the real world
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.
- Toby Inkster has compiled a document on transforming XFN into FOAF
On the web
- The quite excellent Optimus transformer and validator tool (supporting all major microformats) has been updated to 0.5.1.
- Fuzzbot is a Mozilla Firefox extension to expose microformat and RDFa data within pages.
This weeks’s bulletin was put together with contributions from Toby Inkster. 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 web
Face-to-Face Events
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!
