‘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- The parsers page has fallen a little out of date.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!
A bumper round up of microformats from 4th–17th December 2006
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
The 2nd and 3rd of September saw the first BarCamp event in the UK, held at Yahoo! HQ in London.
Participants came from all areas of technology and web development, but the local Microformateers were in attendance and created a mini-track on the second day with 3 back-to-back presentations.
The first was my own and consisted of a brief introduction to Microformats, what they are, and how they should be used. Most of the session was discussion based and allowed those new to Microformats to air their confusions and also lead nicely into the pros and cons plus Microformats versus other technologies. Jeremy Keith was especially vocal and was a great help during this session.
Following this, Glenn Jones took over with a more indepth look at a specific use of Microformats in the d.Construct backnetwork. He showed the attendees around the implementations, and also shared his experiences with Microformats and building an application that was build around them rather than including them as an after thought.
Finally Drew Mclellan stepped in with “Parsing Microformats - Publishing is for Wimps”. This presentation, as the name suggests, discussed the difficulties in parsing Microformats and explanation of some tools that do this - and more specifically a look at the code in his hKit which is his own parser built in PHP5.
The weekend was a real success story for Microformats with many attendees having never encountered them before BarCamp but leaving with the knowledge, enthusiasm and intent to incorporate them into their own builds!
Yahoo Local has announced that they’re now publishing their data in microformats. Included are hCards, hCalendars and hReviews.
I’m not sure how many instances of data this is, but its likely in the millions. Add that to hundreds of thousands of events on Upcoming.org, thousands of reviews on Yahoo! Tech and millions of hCards on Flickr profiles and Yahoo! is easily the largest support of microformats today.
