Tag: tails

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.

Tags for this entry

dotMac Webmail implements hCard

As reported by Chris Messina, Apple’s dotMac team has added hCard support to their webmail application.

Despite recently canceling my dotMac account, I think this is important news because it highlights a use case of microformats which many have not recognized.

Up until now, most usage of hCard has been people publically publishing contact information. Putting it in hCard allows people to use X2V to convert it to a vCard, which most address book applications support.

In the case of dotMac’s webmail, the contact information isn’t public– it’s in a private view of an individual user. By marking up this data with hCard, browsers which understand hCard can recognize what they’re rendering and do smart things with it. Today, the best tool for doing this is the wonderful Tails Firefox extension. Tails will highlight microformats in a page and allow you to extact them to your address book or calendar.

My point in all of this? Semantic markup is valuable no matter where you use it– public or private– because it allows us to build smart tools for consuming the information.

Tags for this entry