‘This Week in Microformats’ is a summary of notable microformats activity from the mailing lists, wiki, events and the wider web.
On the wiki
- Din Neville has been working hard this week, updating the Russian translation of the wiki. Thank you, Din.
- datetime-design-pattern contains documentation and discussion of alternative patterns to represent dates and times.
- The parsers page has fallen a little out of date. If you’d like to help update it with links to current available parsers, please help!
- There’s a new html5 page to track changes in HTML5 which will affect microformats (both positive and negative). Not that these issues don’t affect parsing now, and won’t do until HTML5 is stable.
On the mailing lists
Discuss and Dev have been very busy with discussion around the abbr datetime pattern, there’s a lot of it and the threads cross over quite a lot. The core of these discussions should be documented on the wiki on the aforementioned page over the course of this week. The main threads are in the archive page for µf-dev and the archive page for µf-discuss
Other discussions:
On the web
- Rob Crowther has documented how to use the new microformat API in your Firefox 3 extensions
- Google have added hCard in Google Maps
- Lustro is an application to export the Mac OSX Address Book into hCards
- vAddressBook is a hack to export your Yahoo! Address Book as hCards (with hCalendar events for birthdays)
- Portable Social Networks, The Building Blocks Of A Social Web, an article by Ben Ward in Digital Web Magazine
- David Singleton’s XFN Life Stream tool shows distributed social networking powered by microformats.
- Cognition 0.1 alpha 10 was released.
- Yahoo! Search Monkey has a suggestion board for requesting new features for their microformats enhancements to Search.
- Mail Chimp have started adding hCard mark-up in the footer of HTML emails sent through their service. An interesting experiment with microformats outside the browser.
- Ueli Weiss has written a great hCard-based profile importer, allowing you to pre-fill sign up forms with hCard info, given just a URL. There’s a demo available, too.
- Kornel Lesinski has released an hCard conformance checker (validator). See using microformats.org.
Elsewhere
- It was microformats third birthday on June 20th!
- Weekly Microformats Dinner events are taking place in San Francisco
To contribute to the next issue, please edit the wiki page. Thanks!
Ben Ward