Advocacy
A lot can be done to help advocate the use of microformats. Often, simply by taking an existing site, and adding the suggested microformatting to a few of its pages as examples is all that is necessary to help the developers of the site add the microformats to the site itself. Applications, such as browsers, could also use some guidance on how to best support microformats.
Sometimes advocacy requires comparison and analysis of alternative technologies or approaches. As Mike Schinkel pointed out, we need good answers to comments like "No, we're going to use XYZ instead...".
The goal for this page is to include pointers for how to advocate microformats on new sites and on existing sites that are considering or using alternative approaches, as well as applications that can benefit from supporting microformats.
For general resources for marketing microformats, see spread-microformats.
Adding microformats to Existing Sites
Add sites here that you think would benefit from the addition of microformats. For now they are grouped by the microformat which would primarily benefit the site. Feel free to take a look at some of the sites on this list, document sample pages to be microformatted, add microformats to them, and then add the before/after of the key sections of mark-up to another wiki page for that site.
Successes are also noted; the most recent are flagged as Success!.
If your successes resulted from emails that you sent to site owners/developers, please consider sharing your successful advocacy emails on the advocacy-email-samples page, and along with each email sample, list the sites which responded positively to your email. This way others in the community can learn from your success and hopefully use your email samples to contact additional sites and get them to adopt microformats.
organization
For now this section is organized primarily by microformat, as that's easier for the community to document and keep track of.
However, it may be more useful to publishers if we created another section organized by type of site.
E.g.:
- education - how to add microformats to education sites, especially higher education sites.
- social networks - how to add microformats to social networks, especially for social-network-portability.
etc.
by microformat
- hcard-advocacy
- hcalendar-advocacy
- hreview-advocacy
- hatom-advocacy
- rel-tag-advocacy
- vote-links-advocacy
- xfn-advocacy
h-entry
- pump.io - add h-entry + h-card support to pump.io's web view:
browsers
Browser support of microformats, both built-in, and via plug-ins and extension helps users make better use of the numerous existing sites that have microformats support, as well as encourage sites and site developers to add microformats support.
See browser-advocacy.
publishing tools
Getting publishing tools adopt microformats will perhaps have the biggest impact on expanding the adoption and support of microformats. See cms for current publishing platform support.
Others:
- postlets.com - which crossposs to craigslist.com and other classifieds services. If they generated span+a microformats (which apparently survive posting into Craigstlist posting), the posters could get postings in hCard without any additional work.
- check oodle.com also.
web agencies
More and more web-agencies are supporting microformats both on their own sites and on sites they build.
Getting more web design, development, etc. agencies and related efforts to adopt microformats also has the indirect benefit of them supporting microformats in the sites they build and develop.
If you are a strong and vocal supporter of microformats in your work, please feel free to add yourself to the
- web-agencies page
online tutorials
Add microformats2 to topical online tutorials, especially if they already have classic microformats examples that can be updated.
multiple microformats
In general add such sites to the page for the primary microformat which would benefit from the sites' support. See above.
successes
Magnolia
ma.gnolia supports many microformats. These should all be incorporated into the examples-in-the-wild pages for each specific microformat.
- Microformat Feature Requests on ma.gnolia wiki
- Success! ma.gnolia is implementing semantic features and microformats quickly. Here's a screenshot of my ma.gnolia page, and the Firefox Operator extension's response to its code. Shiny. :) --Carla 10:30, 1 Sep 2007 (PDT)
(click for larger version)
- Success! added a microformats category to the ma.gnolia wiki, with information, and then added it to appropriate pages --Carla 10:37, 3 Sep 2007 (PDT)
OpenStreetMap
- I've just added Geo to OpenStreetMap documentation pages - see Birmingham page on OpenStreetMap for example. Andy Mabbett 02:39, 6 Apr 2007 (PDT)
- OpenStreetMap uses the geo microformat on its wiki for place pages (added by Andy Mabbett) and also on the GPS trace pages and diary entry pages (added by Dan Karran).
Wikipedia
For successes on Wikipedia, see the list of Wikipedia templates generating microformats.
See also the individual microformats advocacy pages for specific microformat successes.
Specifics:
Geo on Wikipedia:
- Wikipedia-IT now has Geo on all pages using the coord template, e.g. Messina. Andy Mabbett 07:05, 26 May 2007 (PDT)
- I've added geo to all images tagged in Wikimedia Commons using decimal values. Example: Montreal City Hall, Jan 2006 Andy Mabbett 08:54, 12 Apr 2007 (PDT)
- Now on pages tagged in D-M-S also.
- Wikipedia-NL now has Geo on all its map-links pages, e.g. maps for Wikipedia-NL article on Birmingham
- Called from 87,724 article pages as of 2006-04-09; reportedly the sixth most popular website in the Netherlands [1].
- I recently added Geo to Wikipedia-DE's map link pages e.g. maps for Wikipedia-DE article on Birmingham. Andy Mabbett 14:27, 9 Apr 2007 (PDT)
- I've just added Geo to Wikipedia's GeoTemplate which is called by many thousands of other Wikipedia pages. Example: the coordinates (top right) in [2] link to [3]; the latter now has a Geo microformat. Andy Mabbett 03:38, 30 Mar 2007 (PDT)
old
These sites have shown no activity for 6 months or more and thus are perhaps not worth the effort.
- ClearForest Semantic Web Services - uses natural language processing tools to recognise people, organisations, places, events and CVs (resumes) in web pages. Would benefit from recognising hCard, hResume, hCalendar, Geo, Adr, etc. Could also use them in its output.