Year: 2006

This Fortnight in Microformats

A bumper round up of microformats from 4th–17th December 2006

New implementations

  • Alex Faaborg of Mozilla Labs has announced availability of ‘Operator’, a Firefox extension written by Michael Kaply at IBM (download from Firefox Add‑ons). Operator detects hCard, hCalendar, geo, hReview and rel-tag and allows you to combine those microformats with desktop applications and web services such as Google Maps and Yahoo! Calendar. Alex has also written some accompanying introductions to microformats and collected comments in mozilla.apps.dev.firefox.
  • Also for Firefox, the popular Tails extension has been updated to 0.3.6.
  • Nick Peters has written a Greasemonkey script called Social xFolk to highlight xFolk microformatted bookmarks. It appends ‘Add to Delicious’ and ‘Add to Magnolia’ buttons in the page.

On the Wiki

From uf-discuss

  • Ted Drake is interested to see if the recipes microformat brainstorming can move on with a request for real-world examples and experiments
  • With Mars and the Moon getting in the news, Andy Mabbett has redrawn attention to the Mars and Luna extensions to Geo.
  • Jason Garber asked about rel=”muse” in XFN, wanting a means to indicate professional respect towards a person, rather than ‘romantic’ respect. For clarification, that category of values in XFN is ‘romantic’ as-in ‘romanticism’, and are not intentionally restricted to love-interest.
  • Off the back this XFN discussion came discussion about a so-called ‘XPN’ (an ‘XHTML Professionals Network’ microformat). In response to this, there’s interest in identifying real-world implementations that could benefit by publishing professional relationships (think employee/employer, clients, sub-contractors and so forth). If you are involved with or know of sites that could harness such distributed professional networking, please get in touch on the list.
  • Taylor Cowan is looking for more semantic detail on Q&A mark-up; going beyond the humble definition list. As usual, real-world examples are collected on the wiki and discussion should take place on the list.

On the web

  • Following the healthy bloom of new cheat-sheets Brian Suda has updated his Microformats Cheatsheet PDF.
  • Roger L Costello has created a comprehensive hCard presentation (using S5). Not only does it provide an introduction to using hCard it also provides detail on use of class="value" for properties, and the flexibility enabled by an oft‑overlooked feature.

‘This week in microformats’ aims to highlight the most active microformats discussion published in the preceding week by monitoring the microformats discuss mailing list, and the microformats tag on Technorati (and elsewhere). If you’d like to alert the editors to something, add a ‘thisweekinmicroformats’ tag.

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This week in Microformats #2

A quick-fire round up of microformats for the week of November 27th.

On the Wiki

  • Andy Mabbett has created some property cheat-sheets for adr and geo — small microformats most commonly found in hCard but which can be used separately as well.
  • To cope with the sheer number of examples and implementations now amassed for hCard, hCalendar and hReview, Andy Mabbett and Tantek Çelik have separated the lists of examples‑in‑the‑wild (hCard, hCalendar, hReview) and implementations (hCard, hCalendar, hReview) into separate pages. This seems an ideal cue to restate that anyone is entitled to include their implementations and microformat deployments on these pages. Just please link directly to the page where microformats can be found (rather than, or at least in addition to a front‑page).

From uf-discuss

Also, there’s ongoing discussion about the preference of using a mailing list over other collaboration mediums (such as message boards and IRC). The list is here to stay, but Edward O’Connor has linked to an RSS feed provided by Gmane, allowing you to subscribe to new posts without signing up for the mailing list.

On the web

  • The WHATWG Blog has announced the addition of a new link type in HTML5 for linking to feeds (rel="feed"). The post notes that this can make auto-discovery easier and also makes linking to hAtom feeds tidier.
  • One post that got away from the decentralised‑social‑networking round‑up last week was Glenn Jones’ excellent piece on how XFN‘s rel=me can already provide a strong backbone for spidering identities over the internet. See also Sarah’s post on Portable social networks.

‘This week in microformats’ aims to highlight the most active microformats discussion published in the preceding week by monitoring the microformats discuss mailing list, and the microformats tag on Technorati (and elsewhere). If you’d like to alert the editors to something, add a ‘thisweekinmicroformats’ tag.

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This week in microformats 1

A quick-fire round up of what’s happened in the microformats world this week; new implementations, major mailing list discussions and microformat-related discussion from the web at large.

New implementations

Also, Drew McLellan posted a teaser of a Microformats Firefox toolbar, and a new Microformats in Drupal group has formed to see better implementation of microformats in the Drupal CMS.

From uf-discuss

On the web

‘This week in microformats’ aims to highlight the most active microformats discussion published in the preceding week by monitoring the microformats discuss mailing list, and the microformats tag on Technorati (and del.icio.us, and so forth). If you’d like to alert the editors to something, tag it ‘thisweekinmicroformats’ as well.

dotMac Webmail implements hCard

As reported by Chris Messina, Apple’s dotMac team has added hCard support to their webmail application.

Despite recently canceling my dotMac account, I think this is important news because it highlights a use case of microformats which many have not recognized.

Up until now, most usage of hCard has been people publically publishing contact information. Putting it in hCard allows people to use X2V to convert it to a vCard, which most address book applications support.

In the case of dotMac’s webmail, the contact information isn’t public– it’s in a private view of an individual user. By marking up this data with hCard, browsers which understand hCard can recognize what they’re rendering and do smart things with it. Today, the best tool for doing this is the wonderful Tails Firefox extension. Tails will highlight microformats in a page and allow you to extact them to your address book or calendar.

My point in all of this? Semantic markup is valuable no matter where you use it– public or private– because it allows us to build smart tools for consuming the information.

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Downtime

Yesterday morning (Pacific Time), the box that hosts microformats.org had a disk failure. Of course, this happened right as we were about to migrate it to a new host.

The box has been offline since then. We’re now getting our services setup on a new VPS. The blog and wiki are both up and working. We’re working on getting the mailing lists operational now. I’ll update this post as things progress.

Update: Things appear to back up and running. Please leave a comment if you see anything missing.