Month: December 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.

Tags for this entry