introduction

Introduction to Microformats

Related: press, presentations, podcasts, suggested-reading, testimonials

What are Microformats?

Microformats are a way of adding simple markup to human-readable data items such as events, contact details or locations, on web pages, so that the information in them can be extracted by software and indexed, searched for, saved, cross-referenced or combined.

More technically, they are items of semantic markup, using just standard (X)HTML with a set of common class-names. They are open and available, freely, for anyone to use.

Why Microformats

Why did we come up with microformats?

In short, microformats are the convergence of a number of trends:

1. a logical next step in the evolution of web design and information architecture
2. a way for people and organisations to publish richer information themselves, without having to rely upon centralized services
3. an acknowledgment that (outside of specialist areas) "traditional" metadata efforts have either failed or taken so long to garner any adoption, that a new approach was necessary
4. a way to use (X)HTML for data.

The Appeal to Simplicity

• Microformats are a simple effort which has appealed to many frustrated with previous complex efforts. One parallel that can be drawn is to REST in the web services world, i.e. see this comparison of microformats and REST. See the REST wiki for more about REST. Related microformats and microprotocols.
• See also: Web Services and the Innovators Dilemma by Justin Leavesley

Related Pages

• Recent press interviews and articles are also a good introduction.
• See microformat presentations for more background and introductory material on microformats.
• Listen to podcasts about microformats.
• More suggested reading
• So you wanna implement microformats?

Articles

• Digital Web Magazine: Microformats Primer by Garrett Dimon
• An Extra SIDE to Web Standards Based Design - How Semantic Information Design Ethics (SIDE) and a few readily available techniques can help heal the Web, by Jon Tan. See also his CSS Zen Garden "Leggo my ego" entry.
• Andrew D. Hume has written a blog post introducing microformats and another one on usable microformats.
• Practical Microformats with hCard by Drew McLellan
• Jesse Skinner's introduction to hCard
• Shaun Shull's great post on How Microformats Affect Seearch Engine Optimization
• Blog Business Summit: Microformats in Plain English: the Promise of Simple Business to Business Data Exchange by Steve Broback

Miscellaneous Reference

These are various intro-related links/articles which I haven't figured out yet how to incorporate. You may find them of interest. - Tantek

• Data First vs. Structure First
  • Tantek says: In many ways it is actually *far* worse than that post conveys. The "typical" programmer literally loves spending far more time worrying about and designing the structure for structure's sake, than data, and even less so, "real world" data (current behaviors etc.). Hence we have taken the directly opposite tack with microformats when looking to solve a problem.
    • Zeroeth, define the real-world problem. If you can't do this, then stop.
    • First, look at real-world usage (data).
    • Second, what previous standards are people actually using today? If there is more than one, then lean towards those with the better adoption.
    • And only after those first two do we bother to pay attention to theoretical standards, those that have been invented (whether by individuals, committees), but haven't seen much if any actual adoption.
• 2000-03-21 Dan Connolly on human-consumable information: (strong emphasis added)
  • I believe that one of the best ways to transition into RDF, if not a long-term deployment strategy for RDF, is to manage the information in human-consumable form (XHTML) annotated with just enough info to extract the RDF statements that the human info is intended to convey. In other words: using a relational database or some sort of native RDF data store, and spitting out HTML dynamically, is a lot of infrastructure to operate and probably not worth it for lots of interesting cases. We all know that we have to produce a human-readable version of the thing... why not use that as the primary source?