advocacy

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Advocacy

A lot can be done to help advocate the use of microformats. Often, simply by taking an existing site, and adding the suggested microformatting to a few of its pages as examples is all that is necessary to help the developers of the site add the microformats to the site itself. Applications, such as browsers, could also use some guidance on how to best support microformats.

Sometimes advocacy requires comparison and analysis of alternative technologies or approaches. As Mike Schinkel pointed out, we need good answers to comments like "No, we're going to use XXX instead...".

The goal for this page is to include pointers for how to advocate microformats on new sites and on existing sites that are considering or using alternative approaches, as well as applications that can benefit from supporting microformats.

For general resources for marketing microformats, see spread-microformats.

Adding Microformats to Existing Sites

Add sites here that you think would benefit from the addition of microformats. For now they are grouped by the microformat which would primarily benefit the site (so that folks who feel they are good at adding a particular microformat. Feel free to take a look at some of the sites on this list, document sample pages to be microformatted, add microformats to them, and then add the before/after of the key sections of mark-up to another wiki page for that site.

hCard

Adding hCard to these sites would make them quite handy for their users and for being indexed:

Online Profiles

Nearly every website that has a login has a page representing the public profile of the user that other users can see and interact with. Many such sites already support hCard (e.g. ClaimID.com, Flickr.com, Technorati.com, Zooomr.com). Here are some that I think would benefit from the addition of hCard to their profile / user pages. Feel free to add more such sites that have a social network profile-like component and I'll see what I can do. Tantek 17:44, 13 Dec 2006 (PST)

  • Twitter.com - working on it Tantek 17:44, 13 Dec 2006 (PST)
  • Consumating.com - working on it Tantek 17:44, 13 Dec 2006 (PST)
  • Wikimedia - including this site, Wikipedia, Wikitravel, etc.

Online Venues

There are many sites that offer pages that represent organizations and venues that could benefit from being marked up with hCard. Yahoo Local venues are marked up with hCards for example. Here are some more sites that have venues that would benefit from hCard markup.

Wikpedia hCard

Telephone Directory Listings

Telephone Directory Listings could usefully apply hCard to their results pages. Andy Mabbett 03:10, 13 Nov 2006 (PST)

e.g. (please add other examples!):

Postal (ZIP) code Finders

Postal code Finders could usefully apply hCard to their results pages. Andy Mabbett 12:09, 13 Nov 2006 (PST)

e.g. (please add other examples!):

Government hCard

UK Gov. hCard
Europe Gov. hCard

Organization Contacts

Many companies and organizations have about or contact pages that could benefit from being marked up with hCard. Technorati's contact page for example is both marked up with hCard and has a convenient "Add to Address Book" hCard to vCard converter link. The following company sites could benefit from similar markup (and, until user agents support hCards natively, "Add to Address Book" links). Tantek 17:44, 13 Dec 2006 (PST)

Other hCard

hCalendar

hCalendar could be used on these sites:

W3C track at WWW2006

  • DanC offers a 150 point bounty to anybody who takes the W3C track at WWW2006 and adds hCalendar markup and sends it to connolly@w3.org,www-archive@w3.org

Television listings

  • A major coup would be to get one of the major players (the BBC, Sky, or PBS, say), to mark up their TV or radio listings with hCalendar - does anyone have contacts in such an organisation? Andy Mabbett 10:53, 21 Oct 2006 (PDT)
    • Does anyone have URLs to the TV or radio listings of the major players? Getting those URLs would be the next step, and then doing the markup ourselves would be the next step after that. Tantek 13:02, 21 Oct 2006 (PDT)

e.g. (please add other examples!):

Government hCalendar

UK Gov. hCalendar

Sports Fixtures

e.g. (please add other examples!):

Concert/ Theatre Listings

e.g. (please add other examples!):

hReview

hReview could be used on these sites:

Government hReview

UK Gov. hReview
  • E-petitions (in draft, and asking for suggested improvements}
    • Requested by e-mail, 2006-12-01 Andy Mabbett 11:48, 1 Dec 2006 (PST)
      • reply: "I've added it to our list of ideas." 2006-12-04 Andy Mabbett 11:08, 4 Dec 2006 (PST)

Other hReview

hAtom

hAtom could be used on these sites:

Government hAtom

UK Gov. hAtom
  • E-petitions (in draft, and asking for suggested improvements}
    • Requested by e-mail, 2006-12-01 Andy Mabbett 11:49, 1 Dec 2006 (PST)
      • reply: "I've added it to our list of ideas." 2006-12-04 Andy Mabbett 11:07, 4 Dec 2006 (PST)

Other hAtom

Geo

Adding "Geo" markup to these sites would make them even more useful:

rel-tag

Google as rel-tag namespace

A Google search for 'sparrow' resolves to http://www.google.com/search?&q=sparrow, if not the unwieldy http://www.google.com/search?hs=TUz&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-GB%3Aofficial&q=sparrow&btnG=Search - likewise http://www.google.com/search?&q=%22black+redstart%22 for ' "black redstart" '. If Google can be persuaded to also accept, say, http://www.google.com/search/sparrow and http://www.google.com/search/black_redstart as being equivalent (and assuming that the latter term searches for ' "black redstart" ', with the quote marks), then Google would become a namespace for rel-tag. Andy Mabbett 00:15, 29 Nov 2006 (PST)

There is a workaround:

Andy Mabbett 04:56, 30 Nov 2006 (PST)

Various

  • eBay (.com and localised versions)
    • hCard - Buyer and seller address details.
    • hCalendar - Auction end date/times.
    • hReview - Feedback.
    • hAtom - Recent purchases/ won/ lost/ watching etc.
    • Requested by feedback form, 2006-12-05. Andy Mabbett

IT News sites

There is obviously a great deal of publicity to be gained, by having uFs used on sites about IT developments, which are likely to be read by people in a position to have uFs used, and uF tools implemented, in their organisations. Please add to this list!

Adding Microformats to Applications

User-agents (browsers, etc.) should support microformats natively. For instance, a user should not need to use a third party application or web service to add address details or events from a microformat-using web page to their address book or calendar programme.

Browsers

In addition to the following, third-party developers should be encouraged to make their relevant browser add-ons microforamt aware; or to create new add-ons with microformat capabilities.

Firefox

Firefox developments
ReminderFox
LinkAlert

Opera

Screenreaders

  • Screenreaders (e.g Jaws) could recognise telephone number components of hCards, to differentiate them from other strings of digits. Andy Mabbett 13:02, 9 Dec 2006 (PST)
    • Additional to this, I believe that screen reader users would benefit from being able to recognise any of the microformats. For example, there is value in being verbally notified that a page contains "1 contact and 3 events", or being able to seek out rel attributes with help values. Frances Berriman

Publishing Platforms

Blogger

Drupal

Plone

Adding Microformats to Web Services

ClearForest

  • ClearForest Semantic Web Services - uses natural language processing tools to recognise people, organisations, places, events and CVs (resumes) in web pages. Would benefit from recognising hCard, hResume, hCalendar, Geo, Adr, etc. Could also use them in its output. Andy Mabbett 05:09, 6 Dec 2006 (PST)

Successes

hCard Successes

hCalendar Successes

Geo Successes

Comparisons With Alternative Approaches

CalDAV

Brian Suda

The other great thing about exposing your data as microformats, is that the data becomes Open Data. Will the general public have access to the CalDAV? (probably not) and even if they did, it will probably only serve-up .ics files... what if i don't want ICS? i need to then hack that around to get it into the format that i want... if the data were in the HTML to begin with, then i could EASILY convert that to any format i wanted. Also, sites like http://pingerati.net/ will happily take in hCalendar data and aggregate it, make your data more valuable and easily slurped up by other providers - i don't see that happening as easily with a CalDAV.

Kevin Marks

With respect to CalDAV: I spoke to the CalDAV chaps at Apple about this, they have hCalendar support as a ticket in their db: http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/calendarserver/ticket/19

See Also

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