It’s been a while since we’ve posted a “This Week in Microformats”, and September was a particularly active month for microformats:
- new hResume and hCard implementations
- beautiful hCards, MySpace hCards
- new tutorials and developments
new hResume and hCard implementations
Madgex‘s brand new hResume importer powers the Guardian UK‘s recently launched Guardian Jobs CV Match service. The site YIID (Your Internet Identity) now also supports importing hResumes.
Open source parsing libraries continue being developed for numerous languages. The latest, as noted by Tom Morris on the parsers page, is the Java library org.microformats.hCard written by Reinier Zwitserloot.
beautiful hCards, MySpace hCards
Personal hCards have been around for years, but recently we’re seeing more and more web designers publishing their online identity using beautifully styled hCards, superb complements of form and function. Three in particular:
All three make good use of CSS for styling and layout, and Javascript for dynamic effects. The last of the 3, Jared’s, is more simply styled than the other two, however if you look closely, his list of instant message network addresses also display his live availability on each, a really nice touch.
Got a beautiful hCard you want noticed? Add it to the hCard examples in the wild wiki page.
It’s important to highlight individual hCards like the above, as continued proof that people do write web pages, HTML, markup in general, by hand. Even when such pages are generated from a database used fill out an HTML template, a person still writes the template by hand. And it’s important to highlight those that update templates as well to support microformats.
The list of social network sites with hCard profiles continues to grow, this time with a big addition: MySpace.
As of about a month ago, all new MySpace profiles, and all current users who upgrade their profile to version 2.0, automatically get hCard support, as confirmed by MySpace’s platform developers.
new tutorials and developments
Behind all these new microformats implementations and sites is a vibrant and active community, not just here on microformats.org, but across the web as a whole, and across web development communities as well.
The standards-championing Dev Opera community recently published a wonderful article on Styling and extracting hCalendar by Christopher Schmitt, and updated it with use of the value class pattern for better accessibility.
Safari Books Online and New Riders have made published a video, Designing with Microformats for a Beautiful Web, by well known web designer Andy Clarke.
And finally, last but not least, this past month saw the resolution of all outstanding issues on both hCard and hCalendar, paving the way for updates to the specs, FAQs, and 1.0.1 drafts, incorporating important errata, updates, and brainstormed improvements.
The microformats community was quite busy this summer, and September brought a lot of forward progress. October is shaping up to be even more impressive.
For more microformats updates as they happen, be sure to subscribe to the microformats discuss mailing list and the @microformats Twitter.
Tantek