introduction

2012-01-02T00:26:14Z

Peter james:

<entry-title>Introduction to Microformats</entry-title>
== What are Microformats? ==

Microformats are a way of adding simple markup to human-readable data items such as events, contact details or locations, on web pages, so that the information in them can be extracted by software and indexed, searched for, saved, cross-referenced or combined.

More technically, they are items of semantic markup, using just standard "plain old semantic HTML" (i.e. "[[POSH]]") with a set of common [[class-names]] and "[[rel]]" values. They are open and available, freely, for anyone to use.

== Why Microformats ==

Why did we come up with microformats?

In short, microformats are the convergence of a number of trends:
# a logical next step in the evolution of web design and information architecture
# a way for people and organizations to publish richer information themselves, without having to rely upon centralized services
# an acknowledgement that (outside of speci<span class="notspam">alist</span> areas) "traditional" metadata efforts (e.g. meta tags) have either failed or taken so long to garner any adoption, that a new approach was necessary
# a way to use well formed [[HTML]] for data.

== The Appeal to Simplicity ==

* Microformats are a simple effort which has appealed to many frustrated with previous complex efforts.

One parallel that has been drawn is to REST in the API / web services world - for more on REST see [[suggested-reading#REST|suggested reading on REST]].

==Get Started ==
It's easy to get started with microformats:
* [[get-started]] with adding microformats to your HTML

==See also==
* A list of [[notable-users|some notable users]].
* Recent [[press]] interviews and [[articles]] are also a good introduction.
* See microformat [[presentations]] for more background and introductory material on [[microformats]].
* Listen to [[podcasts]] about microformats.
* Read the [[faq|FAQs]] for general microformat queries.
* More [[suggested-reading|suggested reading]]
* [[implement|So you want to implement microformats?]]
* [[presentations]]
* [[podcasts]]
* [[testimonials]]

== external ==
* Sitepoint has a nice introductory tutorial: [http://reference.sitepoint.com/html/microformats Microformats - Plugging the Gaps in HTML]
* Premasagar has written up [http://premasagar.com/microformats/compound/ some nice microformats examples with source].

== Translations ==
* [[introduction-pt-br]] (see also [[introduction-pt-br-2]])
* ...

Microformats Wiki - User contributions [en]

introduction