introduction

Introduction to Microformats

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 "plain old semantic (X)HTML" (i.e. "POSH") with a set of common class-names and "rel" values. 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 acknowledgement 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 - for more on REST see suggested reading on REST.
• See: Web Services and the Innovators Dilemma by Justin Leavesley

See also

• A list of some notable users.
• 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.
• Read the FAQs for general microformat queries.
• More suggested reading
• So you want to implement microformats?
• presentations
• podcasts
• testimonials

external

• Sitepoint has a nice introductory tutorial: Microformats - Plugging the Gaps in HTML
• Premasagar has written up some nice microformats examples with source.