Watching the reports of Gnomedex, I heard about a demonstration of extended RSS processing that the Microsoft IE team did regarding a calendar. Dare Obasanjo explains:

Dean then started to talk about the power of the enclosure element in RSS 2.0. What is great about it is that it enables one to syndicate all sorts of digital content. One can syndicate video, music, calendar events, contacts, photos and so on using RSS due to the flexibility of enclosures.

Amar then showed a demo using Outlook 2003 and an RSS feed of the Gnomedex schedule he had created. The RSS feed had an item for each event on the schedule and each item had an iCalendar file as an enclosure. Amar had written a 200 line C# program that subscribed to this feed then inserted the events into his Outlook calendar so he could overlay his personal schedule with the Gnomedex schedule. The point of this demo was to show that RSS isn’t just for aggregators subscribing to blogs and news sites.

Now, being able to subscribe to an event calendar is very handy, but there is a much simpler way – using hCalendar and Brian Suda’s x2v calendar parsing tool.
I adapted the conference calendar page, to add an “hevent” to each session ( with help from Ryan and his hCalendar creator).

Now you can subscribe to it directly using the x2v link. This is available today, not in a future release of IE, and you can easily add events to your blog or webpage this way for people to subscribe to.
Tags: gnomedex, hCalendar, microformat

Tantek and Rohit were interviewed by David Weinberger at Supernova 2005 about microformats. Its rough and uncut, but they do a good job of giving an overview of what microformats are all about.

Go watch it.

Thanks very much to everyone that made it to the microformats workshop here at Supernova 2005. In particular, thanks to our panelists Rohit Khare, Adam Rifkin, Michael Sippey, Kevin Marks, Kragen Sitaker, and Marty Tenenbaum.

I’ve posted my presentation, What Are Microformats?.

Looking forward to more discussions about microformats here at Supernova2005.

As part of the Supernova Microformats presentation,
Here are my slides

As part of the Supernova Microformats presentation, I gave an overview of the relTag microformat. and Tag Tuesday
My Supernova Tags slides
The conference tag is supernova2005.

I’m pleased to announce the launch of microformats.org, a new community-based site providing a home for anything and everything regarding microformats. With many contributors, format authors, and design aficionados donating their talents and enthusiasm, it was only natural to create a homebase that would support not only the current buzz about microformats, but that would also help spread the word and inspire new formats and ways of thinking about meaningful markup.

If you’re new to microformats, then now is perhaps the most convenient time to become familiar with them. This site is stacked to the rafters with information on what microformats are, what they do, who’s involved with them, as well as the detailed specificatons themselves.

In the true spirit of the web, microformats are designed for humans first, taking advantage of what works today. Built on exisiting standards such as XML and XHTML, microformats are a new way of thinking about markup, exposing the visible data that’s already in page content. If you’ve ever pondered the many ways in which to markup an event, a calendar or a business card, then you’ve already understood the importance of microformats. By deciding on “micro” “formats” for valuable chunks of data, we can apply a rich structure that we, as humans, can write, edit, and understand. Microformats are about using the full potential of the web now, rather than throwing away what works and getting people to change the way they work.

So, in order to push microformats out to designers and developers of the world, this site was created to do just that. We’ve organized the site into the following areas:

Wiki

The wiki is brimming with existing microformat specifications, and detailed information on what they do, how they’re implemented, who’s responsible, etc.

Code

The code section of the site is a repository of tools to help you create and implement microformats.

Discuss

There are many ways to join the discussion about microformats, including three mailing lists, and IRC channel, and of course the blog.

About

Learn more about this site, who’s behind it and the microformats themselves.

We’re honored to have you visiting us, and hope that you will join in helping enable humans to make the most of the web.