On the wiki

• Toby Inkster has compiled a document on transforming XFN into FOAF

On the µf-Discuss mailing list

• Talk about how to use agent in hCard with hAtom to mark up journal entries

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!

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!

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!

On the wiki

• Along with the revival of our ‘This Week in Microformats’ posts, they are now drafted live and in public on the wiki. You can make your own contributions for next week’s post. We hope this will make it easier to keep these updates coming out regularly. Next weeks post is drafted at ThisWeek/2008-03-17 on the wiki

From uf-discuss

• Entry Author and Entry Updated/Created requirements in hAtom 0.2.

Developments on uf-new

• Microformats for Slide Show/Presentations - What’s the State-of-the-Art?
• David Janes asks about how to parse microformats when they are spread over multiple pages (Multi-Paged XFN)
• A new discussion on hCalendar, concerning whether some hEvent properties could be shared across entire calendars, to better match publishing patterns.

On the web

• Microsoft adapts parts hAtom into an IE8 feature called webslices. Discussion.
• Sarah Bourne, Chief Technology Strategist for Massachusetts compares RDFa and microformats and draws attention to a number of accessibility and standardization issues, we’re pleased to say that some of these have already been fixed, or are being worked on. Discussion, and comments.
• hAtom 0.2 meeting photos at SGFooCamp.
• XTiger templating/structured editing language, used for microformats: Templates, Microformats and Structured Editing. Discussion.
• Popular webdesign site Sitepoint discusses microformats: Microformats - Plugging the Gaps in HTML
• Yahoo! Search announced  their new Open Search platform, allowing third parties to build on top of search, enhancing results with various semantic technologies including microformats.

This week’s entry was put together with contributions from Ben Ward, David Janes and Gerald Bauer.

Textual content on the Web is dominated by HTML (including XHTML of course) due to its broad reach and ease of authorship. The more we are able to use HTML as the common carrier of higher fidelity chunks of information, the more we empower and enrich the publishing and sharing of textual content.

Thus microformats are developed in line with “plain old semantic HTML” (POSH) practices and principles, that is, as valid semantic extensions to HTML. Semantic HTML by itself enables sharing open content with headings, paragraphs, and lists, etc. Microformats build upon that foundation, reusing rather than reinventing (i.e. XOXO reuses HTML for lists and nested lists for outlines, rather than inventing new tags or vocabulary), and extending only for commonly published semantics beyond HTML, such as contact information, events, reviews, episodic content, etc.

These extensions can be used to publish documents containing just one type of information for consumption by domain-specific applications (e.g. a contact list for address books, or an event list for calendaring tools), or many types intermixed and nested, embedded in a larger document that ties them all together with meaningful context such as a resume, meaning that would be lost were each type of data isolated, removed from its context, and published in its own special-purpose format silo.

Whether simple collections, or compound documents, by building on HTML, all such uses work well not only on their own, but embedded and mixed with existing web content, in a way well understood by web authors, browsers and search engines alike, in stark contrast to other methods. Finally, it is this broader reach, to existing content, authors, applications, search services, and a variety of devices, that makes textual content built on HTML even more open from a practical perspective.