Main Page
<entry-title>Welcome to the microformats wiki!</entry-title>
Please start with the introduction page and read how-to-play before making any edits.
Introduction
This wiki is the central resource of the microformats community. You'll find current versions of published microformat specifications, specification drafts and publishing patterns. The wiki also hosts development resources, such as brainstorming pages for new formats and issue tracking pages for all current and in-development microformats.
Get Started
To get started with microformats:
- First, be familiar writing your pages and applications with semantically rich, descriptive, ‘POSH’ HTML.
- Learn about microformats from the about page, blog, press, presentations, books, podcasts, & screencasts pages.
- Take a look at established specifications such as hCard and hCalendar, and follow the examples to start publishing microformats.
- Have questions? Read the frequently asked questions and see the glossary for terms and definitions. You can also post to the mailing list.
- Want to learn more in person? Check out microformats events.
Definition
Microformats are small patterns of HTML to represent commonly published things like people, events, blog posts, reviews and tags in web pages.
Microformats enable the publishing of higher fidelity information on the Web; the fastest and simplest way to provide feeds and APIs for the information in your website.
- Read more explanations of what microformats are, and what you can do with them.
How to contribute
Do you want to help take microformats to the next level? You can:
- Get started by adding microformats to your website, services, and products.
- Advocate the use of microformats on other web sites, especially those you use.
- Write a testimonial.
- Do something on the to do list.
- Join the IRC Channel and mailing lists to learn and help answer questions (read the general guidelines before posting).
- Translate this microformats wiki into other languages to make microformats more accessible to readers of languages around the world.
- Before proposing any new microformats, make sure your website is POSH, uses existing microformats, and then read the process.
This wiki has a number of enhancements to assist development and contributions to microformats. Before you start editing, see the wiki introduction page for instructions.
Specifications
The list of current, stable Microformats open standard specifications.
- hCalendar - hCalendar creator
- hCard - hCard creator
- rel-license
- rel-nofollow
- rel-tag
- VoteLinks
- XFN - XFN creator
- XMDP
- XOXO
If you're tempted to try your hand at writing a microformat please read the process page first!
Drafts
Drafts are newer microformats, for which the specifications haven't been completed yet. Drafts are somewhat mature in the development process (see exploratory-discussions for additional efforts that are not as far along in the process). The stability of these documents cannot be guaranteed, and implementers should be prepared to keep abreast of future developments and changes. Please watch the wiki pages for updates.
- adr - for marking up address information
- geo - for marking up WGS84 geographic coordinates (latitude; longitude)
- hAtom - syndicating episodic content (e.g. weblog postings)
- hAudio
- hListing - open, distributed listings
- hMedia - A single media publishing format that relates to Images, Video and Audio.
- hNews
- hProduct
- hRecipe - for cooking+baking recipes
- hResume - for publishing resumes and CVs
- hReview - hReview creator
- rel-directory - to indicate that the destination of a hyperlink is a directory listing containing an entry for the current page
- rel-enclosure - for indicating attachments (e.g. files) to download and cache
- rel-home - indicate a hyperlink to the homepage of the site
- rel-payment - indicate a payment mechanism
- 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
See: exploratory-discussions for details of research and analysis of real-world examples, existing formats, and brainstorming of possible new microformats, per the microformats process.
Examples
Resources
See resources.
User centric development
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. That section is intended for editors, parsers, validators, test cases, and other information relevant across multiple microformats.
Microformats wiki translations
You may read and edit microformats articles in many other languages:
- languages with over 100 articles
- Français (French) mis à jour!
- languages with over 10 articles
- languages with over 2 articles
- languages just started
- elsewhere
- Wikipedia's article on microformats has been translated into a number of languages.
See also other-languages, and how-to-start-a-new-translation.