microformats

microformats

microformats are:

• a way of thinking about data
• design principles for formats
• adapted to current behaviors and usage patterns ("Pave the cow paths." - Adam Rifkin)
• highly correlated with semantic XHTML, AKA the real world semantics, AKA lowercase semantic web, AKA lossless XHTML
• described by Tantek's recent presentation at SXSW: The Elements of Meaningful XHTML
• a set of simple open data format standards that many (including Technorati) are actively developing and implementing for more/better structured blogging and web microcontent publishing in general.
• "An evolutionary revolution" - Ryan King
• all the above.

microformats are not:

• a new language
• infinitely extensible and open-ended
• an attempt to get everyone to change their behavior and rewrite their tools
• a whole new approach that throws away what already works today
• a panacea for all taxonomies, ontologies, and other such abstractions
• defining the whole world, or even just boiling the ocean
• any of the above

the microformats principles

• solve a specific problem
• start as simple as possible
  • solve simpler problems first
  • make evolutionary improvements
• design for humans first, machines second
  • be presentable and parsable
  • visible data is better than invisible metadata
  • adapt to current behaviors and usage patterns, e.g. (X)HTML, blogging
• reuse building blocks from widely adopted standards
  • semantic, meaningful (X)HTML. See SemanticXHTMLDesignPrinciples for more details.
  • existing microformats
  • well established schemas from interoperable RFCs
• modularity / embeddability
  • design to be reused and embedded inside existing formats and microformats
• enable and encourage decentralized development, content, services
  • explicitly encourage "spirit of the Web"

microformats presentations

• See separate microformats presentations page.

the business case for microformats

• Microformats provide immediate search visibility
• Microformats and do-it-yourself vertical search aggregation

microformats specifications

People, Companies, Organizations

• hCard

Calendars and Events

• hCalendar

Opinions, Ratings and Reviews

• VoteLinks
• hReview

Social Networks

• XFN - XHTML Friends Network

Licenses, open source, content sharing

• rel="license" - RelLicense - in use by:
  • Creative Commons

Tags, keywords, categories

• rel="tag" - RelTag - in use by:
  • Technorati
  • EVDB
  • numerous content authoring platforms (blogging tools etc.)
• xFolk with specific application to distributed social bookmarking. In use by:
  • de.lirio.us
  • blogmarks
  • Other implementations pending for Microformats and do-it-yourself vertical search aggregation.

Lists and Outlines

• XOXO
  • XOXO code

hyperlink relationships

• • tracked by Technorati Votes
  • rel="nofollow" - relNoFollow - in use by:
    • Google
    • Technorati
    • numerous content authoring platforms (blogging tools etc.)

Foundation

• XMDP - XHTML Meta Data Profiles

microformats based specifications

The beauty of small and simple microformats is that they can easily be reused as building blocks to for richer formats and specifications.

Attention

• Attention.XML
  • is built with the following microformats
    • XOXO
    • XFN
    • votelinks
  • AttentionQuery for applications and services
  • Prototype OPML converter at http://www.technorati.com/attention.html

microformats experiments and first thoughts

Reviews

• hreview
• reviews-formats - research into existing review schemas and formats to attempt to understand the common simple subset that makes sense to turn into a microformat, as well as analysis of existing review markup structures used for presentation.

News Story Relationships

• Online news relationships

Podcasts

• podcast-metadata - A standard for using HTML to markup podcast "show notes" blog posts with machine usable metadata

Robots Exclusion

• robots-exclusion
• introduction in XMDP-style Robot Profile
  • updated post

Exams and certification

• examl

Job postings

• Jeff Jarvis - The future of classifieds outlines the coming demand for a distributed job posting microformat.

Hymns

• Open Formats for Services: Hymns

Comments

• An idea for structuring blog comments

WikiFormats

• WikiFormats - making formats out of materials common to most all wiki: bold, italic, links, and maybe lists.

Projects

• hDOAP - DOAP (Description of a Project) RDF, rev-engineered to microformat

Discussion

• See blogs discussing this page.
• Interesting parallels between microformats and NKS principles.