advocacy

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. Sometimes advocacy requires comparison and analysis of alternative technologies or approaches. As MikeSchinkel pointed out, we need good answers to comments like "No, we're going to use XXX instead...".

The goal for this page is to include pointers for how to advocate microformats both on new sites, and on existing sites that are considering or using alternative approaches.

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 (so that folks who feel they are good at adding a particular microformat. 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 markup to another wiki page for that site.

hCard

Adding hCard to these sites would make them quite handy for their users and for being indexed.

• Dodgeball venues
• ...

hCalendar

W3C track at WWW2006

• DanC offers a 150 point bounty to anybody who takes the W3C track at WWW2006 and adds hCalendar markup and sends it to connolly@w3.org,www-archive@w3.org

Comparisons With Alternative Approaches

CalDAV

Brian Suda

The other great thing about exposing your data as microformats, is that the data becomes Open Data. Will the general public have access to the CalDAV? (probably not) and even if they did, it will probably only serve-up .ics files... what if i don't want ICS? i need to then hack that around to get it into the format that i want... if the data were in the HTML to begin with, then i could EASILY convert that to any format i wanted. Also, sites like http://pingerati.net/ will happily take in hCalendar data and aggregate it, make your data more valuable and easily slurped up by other providers - i don't see that happening as easily with a CalDAV.

Kevin Marks

With respect to CalDAV: I spoke to the CalDAV chaps at Apple about this, they have hCalendar support as a ticket in their db: http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/calendarserver/ticket/19

Firefox developments

Mozilla are "brainstorming" developments for Firefox 3.0 and beyond, and have a page on microforamt handling at http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Feature_Brainstorming:Microformat_Handling