Main Page

Microformats Wiki

Hello! Welcome to the microformats wiki. If this is your first visit, please see the introduction page.

Please read how-to-play before making any edits.

Please read process before proposing any new microformats.

Getting Started

What are microformats? What can you do with them?

The about page, plus recent press, presentations, podcasts, and screencasts are also good places for some background information.

Frequently asked questions about the wiki and microformats in general are answered in the FAQ.

Want to learn more in person? Check out microformats events.

Definition

One popular definition from our mailing list (see also: mailing-lists) is "simple conventions for embedding semantics in HTML to enable decentralized development." More precisely, microformats can be defined as:

simple conventions

for embedding semantic markup

for a specific problem domain

in human-readable (X)HTML/XML documents, Atom/RSS feeds, and "plain" XML

that normalize existing content usage patterns

using brief, descriptive class names

often based on existing interoperable standards

to enable decentralized development

of resources, tools, and services

"Or do you just use your browser to browse? That's so 20th century." -- Mark Pilgrim

How to contribute

Do you want to help take microformats to the next level? You can:

• Check out our open to do list for things to help get done.
• Join the mailing lists and IRC Channel to learn and help answer questions about microformats.
• Advocate the use of microformats.
• help to translate the microformats wiki into other languages to make microformats globally accessible.

Specifications

Microformats open standards specifications (see also: implementations)

• hCalendar
• hCard
• rel-license
• rel-nofollow
• rel-tag
• VoteLinks
• XFN (see also: xfn-implementations)
• XMDP
• XOXO

Drafts

• adr
• geo
• hAtom new!
• hResume new!
• hReview
• rel-directory
• rel-enclosure
• rel-home
• rel-payment
• Robots Exclusion
• xFolk

Design Patterns

Design patterns are common uses of markup across microformats.

• abbr-design-pattern
• class-design-pattern
• date-design-pattern
• datetime-design-pattern
• include-pattern
• value-class-pattern
• rel-design-pattern

Exploratory Discussions

Research and analysis of real-world examples, existing formats, and brainstorming to motivate the microformat.

• alternates brainstorming, examples
• attention
• blog description examples
• blog info examples
• blog post examples, formats, and brainstorming (yielded the hAtom draft)
• book examples, formats, and brainstorming
• chat examples, formats, and brainstorming
• citation effort, examples, formats, brainstorming, and FAQ
• comment problem, examples, and formats (Some stuff needs to be extracted from comments-formats)
• currency; currency-examples; currency-brainstorming new!
• directions examples new!
• directory inclusion examples, formats. (see also rel-directory)
• distributed conversation overview, brainstorming, examples, and formats
• forms examples
• genealogy examples
• group brainstorming and examples
• hash examples
• job listing examples and brainstorming
• last modified examples, formats, and brainstorming
• hListing proposal, and feedback new!
  • Also, listing examples, formats, and brainstorming
• location formats. (see also adr and geo)
• luna (geo-like co-ordinates, for places on The Moon) new!
• mars (geo-like co-ordinates, for places on the planet Mars) new!
• measures and measurement units measure
• media-info (examples, formats, brainstorming)
• meeting minutes examples, formats, and brainstorming
• metalink examples new!
• microsummary brainstorming new!
• MFO examples
• music examples
• photo note examples
• recipe examples
• rel-product brainstorming
• requirements testing overview, and examples
• REST examples
• resume brainstorming, and formats
• review examples, and formats (yielded the hReview draft)
• search results example
• show brainstorming
• showroll brainstorming
• species - for the marking up of the scientific names of living things: species-examples; species-brainstorming new!
• table examples
• tagspeak examples
• tagcloud examples, and brainstorming. new!
• transit table examples
• uid
• widget examples, and brainstorming
• wiki formats
• work of art overview, examples, formats, and brainstorming new!
• XMDP brainstorming (see also xmdp-faq)

Examples

• examples
• zen-garden

Tools & Test Cases & Additional Research

The first place to look for examples, code, and test cases is in the pages for each individual microformat. There are only a few cross-cutting tools and services that need to process more than one microformat. This section is intended for editors, parsers, validators, test cases, and other information relevant across multiple microformats.

• accessibility
• faqs-for-rdf
• icalendar-implementations
• parsing-microformats
• selected-test-cases-from-the-web
• Source code repository -- HowTo: Download code from the repository
• vcard-implementations, vcard-errata
• why-are-content-standards-hard

shared work areas

• buttons
• spread-microformats new!
• demo - a page with links for quickly demonstrating microformats working in practice.
• events new!
• to-do
• user-interface
• marked-for-deletion

microformats wiki in other languages

You may read and edit microformats articles in many other languages:

• languages with over 50 articles
  • Français (French) nouveau !
• languages with over 10 articles
  • Português (Brazilian Portuguese) novo!
• languages with over 2 articles
  • 日本語 (Japanese)
  • Español (Spanish)
• languages with 2 articles
  • Deutsch (German)

microformats translations elsewhere

These are offsite pages/sites with translations about microformats. If you are working on one of these, please consider translating the main microformats website!

• Deutsch (German) mikroformate.pbwiki.com new!

Start a microformats wiki in another language

Don't see the language you want? Help translate the microformats wiki into another language!

We're still figuring this out.

For now, see the Wikipedia page on Multilingual coordination, and How to start a new Wikipedia for some good general tips, advice, and community conventions.

You may want to start with the list of stable-pages, which are pages that are relatively stable, and have only minimal/editorial changes, which makes them much easier to keep in sync with the English versions, by using the my watchlist feature (use it to watch the pages you've translated for changes).

Page naming: for the translated version of a page, use the same name for the page, and simply add the RFC 3066 language identifier code as a dash suffix. E.g. for the French version, Main_Page becomes Main_Page-fr, and how-to-play becomes how-to-play-fr.

more languages folks want to see

• Chinese: 微格式 (Microformats) (see source of translation)