Main Page

Welcome to the microformats wiki!

Please start with the introduction page and read how-to-play before making any edits.

Introduction

• Learn what it means to be POSH new!.
• See the about page, latest news, press, presentations, books, podcasts, & screencasts.
• Have questions? Read the frequently asked questions and see the glossary for new terms.
• Want to learn more in person? Check out microformats events.

Definition

Microformats are small bits of HTML that represent things like people, events, tags, etc. in web pages.

Microformats enable the publishing of higher fidelity information on the Web, providing the fastest and simplest way to support feeds and APIs for your website. See more explanations of what are microformats, 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.
• Find orphaned pages, and add links to them.
• Before proposing any new microformats, make sure your website is POSH, uses existing microformats, and then read the process.

Specifications

Microformats open standards specifications (see also: implementations, examples-in-the-wild). Microformats may be "elemental" or "compound":

Elemental

• rel-license
• rel-nofollow
• rel-tag
• VoteLinks

• XFN (see also: xfn-implementations)
• XMDP
• XOXO

Compound

• hCalendar - hcalendar creator
• hCard - hcard creator

Drafts

• adr - for marking up address information
• geo - for marking up WGS84 geographic coordinates (latitude; longitude)
• hAtom - syndicating episodic content (e.g. weblog postings)
• hResume - for publishing resumes and CVs
• hReview - hrReview 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. Such work is categorised as being:

• Actively being progressed
• Current, but less active
• Moribund
• Formally abandoned or
• Archived

Examples

• examples-in-the-wild
• implementations
• 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
• internationalization
• parsing-microformats
• Profile URI examples, in the wild (Profile URIs for head elements)
• selected-test-cases-from-the-web
• Source code repository -- how to download code from the repository
• user-interface
• User profile examples, in the wild (User profiles, for social websites)
• vcard-implementations, vcard-errata, vcard-suggestions
• why-are-content-standards-hard

resources

• events
• cheatsheets are handy if you need a quick reminder about a particular microformat.
• spread-microformats
• buttons
• icons
• demo - a page with links for quickly demonstrating microformats working in practice.
• Semacode
• jobs
• user-interface
• shortcuts to wiki pages with long names
• pages for deletion
• spell-check dictionary

shared work areas

• to-do
• microformats-issues - issues related to more than one microformat.
• external-issues

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
  • Português (Brazilian Portuguese)
  • 日本語 (Japanese)
• languages with over 2 articles
  • Español (Spanish)
  • Deutsch (German)
  • Romanian
• 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.