Welcome to microformats.org

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.

10 Responses to “Welcome to microformats.org”

  1. S Page :

    > aficiandos
    You mean aficionados.

    Sounds good. But don’t knock ontologies and abstractions that involve RDF, tuples, and all the brain-hurting stuff. I hope for each microformat there’s a way to turn it into an RDF ontology for the “real” Semantic web. If people use microformats, and eggheads use something like GRDDL ( http://www.w3.org/2005/Talks/xtech-grddl/all.html ) to transform them into RDF, then our new computer overlords will have deeper understanding of human-authored documents.

    June 21st, 2005 at 3:41 pm

  2. Ryan :

    S Page-
    There’s already been some work done by (I think) Danny Ayers to use GRDDL for converting microformats into RDF (see this.

    In your characterization of the RDF-web as the “real” Semantic Web, I’m glad you included the quotes, because the RDF-web is no more real than the semantic web that’s being built with microformats.

    June 21st, 2005 at 4:44 pm

  3. Michiel van der Blonk :

    I am really looking for a place where I can brainstorm together with others, and a wiki nor a blog comment suffices.

    June 22nd, 2005 at 5:37 am

  4. Jacob Patton :

    I work for a non-profit organization called Free the Slaves, a group working to elminate modern slavery around the world.

    Our sites visitors are for the most part not very tech-savvy; the same could be said for our staff, as well. Nevertheless, I’ve been able to incorporate some coding features (what are in effect microformats, I think) to make our site function better for our human visitors and for the few scripts I’ve whipped up to allow us to work with data better on the backend. For example, in the wake of the tsunami late last year, I incorporated a del.icio.us feed into our tsunami blog to provide a simple listing of breaking news for our visitors and an incorporated feed (via del.icio.us) for our more advanced users with feedreaders. Similarly, I’m incorporating microformat stylings to our Paypal processing to provide a web-based administrative dashboard, a newsfeed of recent transactions, and hooks into our order- and donation-fulfillment database.

    It doesn’t seem that microformats per se are anything new, but like Ajax, they seem to be embody a complex idea in a simple-to-understand term.

    June 22nd, 2005 at 8:41 am

  5. Ryan :

    Michiel-
    Have you looked at the discuss page?

    June 22nd, 2005 at 9:17 am

  6. Henrik Lied :

    Ah, I seriously love this design.
    Simple, easy and readable.

    Great work!

    June 22nd, 2005 at 4:00 pm

  7. Roland F :

    Hi,
    very nice design I like it very much, congratulations!

    Just a small remark, why the wiki is not styled like the rest of the website ?

    June 23rd, 2005 at 1:16 am

  8. Dave :

    Hmm and this is coded using XHTML? Curiously amazing..

    June 27th, 2005 at 2:38 pm

  9. Dead Reckoning » Archive » Beautiful Structures :

    […] Tantek Çelik’s introduction to the microformats.org weblog […]

    June 24th, 2006 at 11:35 pm

  10. Dead Reckoning » Archive » Cambridge, We Have a Problem :

    […] Tantek Çelik: “Welcome to microformats.org” In the true spirit of the web, microformats are designed for humans first, taking advantage of what works today. Built on existing 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 they way they work. […]

    September 17th, 2006 at 10:34 pm