[uf-discuss] Benefits of Microformats

[George Brocklehurst]

Hi all,

After discovering some misinformation about Microformats on the new  
stackoverflow.com programmer Q&A site and a few conversations last  
night at the Microformats London dinner I felt there was a need to add  
a page to the wiki explaining the benefits of Microformats to  
publishers. We do a great job at telling people what ufs are and how  
to use them, but we're not so great at telling people why they should  
care.

So, I give you http://microformats.org/wiki/benefits
Please do add to, edit and generally improve on the things already  
listed.


As an aside, if anyone's interested this is the accepted answer to  
"should I used Microformats?" on stackoverflow.com that got me  
thinking about the benefits page. Given that the stated aim of Stack  
Overflow is to become the canonical online guide to all things  
programming, I wanted to fix it:

> I think almost anything you'd like to put into a microformat you  
> could make something with a "full" format. hCard.. you could just  
> make a simple vCard file. hCalendar? Make an icalendar file you  
> update and link to it. The advantage to NOT using microformats is  
> that you can use almost any application that supports calendar/ 
> contact etc information and point them at the "full" format instead  
> of the microformat, which requires consumer applications to add more  
> functionality.
>
> To me, that's just the state of things now. I have no technical  
> reason to not use them. I just think that if you just make the  
> "full" format, applications consuming this information are more  
> likely to support/handle it. Though the rel="me" stuff is extra  
> information that you don't get from other things. I'd say use those  
> since they're easy, and adds information that no other format/ 
> standard really does (that I know of).


Thanks,
G