microformats

At this point, it looks like Google is forging ahead with its own structured data standards - and largely ignoring microformats.

Microformats, another version of structured data in XHTML, was launched a little more than a year later by a grassroots group of developers.

This idea of capturing and leveraging microformats across applications is one of our favorite proposed directions for the future.

Microformats work best where they add a very little bit of nuance to common constructs in a host language such as HTML, XHTML, or Atom.

The Web site for microformats is a wiki on which you can add your own formats for whatever data you want to represent.

Some microformats try to tunnel specialized structure into the constructs of the host language.

Microformats are guided by a set of design principles and are developed by community consensus.

Microformats allow you to present metadata in your HTML using existing standards (see Resources).

But before that, let me talk a little about the pros and cons of microformats.

In the last XML Matters article, I mentioned that microformats could really come into their own when coupled with Atom (see Resources).

Much of this data is being structured using Semantic Web technologies like RDFa or microformats.

Ultimately the goal of microformats is to make data easier for humans to parse, while keeping the data friendly for machines to parse.

This method accepts a microformats name, a document reference to start the search from, and an optional array of parameters.

Perhaps we just caught the first glimpse of the missing link with Mozilla's announcement that Firefox will support Microformats.

With Microformats, semantic value is added to existing HTML content by using consistent patterns of standard HTML elements and attributes.

Other microformats that are widely accepted include hCard, a way to embed detailed contact info in a web page.

Google has started to index a handful of vocabularies around people, reviews and video content using both microformats and RDFa.

The lack of support for microformats in these lightweight markup languages is understandable.

What will be particularly interesting to watch is how microformats, the Web community's open standards for structured data, will fare.

Certainly nuance microformats are useful, and build on classic respect for rough consensus and running code.

Microformats are a pragmatic approach to solving the issue of structured data on the Web.

Although both Microsoft and Yahoo have shown some support for microformats, is it enough to stop Google?

The very community that microformats claim to embrace should serve as warning for when microformats go too far.

Most of these are what microformats designers call elemental microformats, which are those constructed entirely within an element.

Now the pages they generate in one system can simply be fed directly into your web service as the input.

That's the big con of new standards -- even XML standards -- and the big plus of microformats.

Until now. Microformats are one small step forward toward exporting structured data on the Web.

Now look at these microformats in more detail to see how to implement them in your code.

This article looks to bring back some perspective of where microformats make sense and where something else is worth a hard look.

Likely candidates are Microformats, and RDFa.

The pet use-case for microformats is Weblogging.

Microformats are just that kind of idea.

Microformats were created as small, focused, domain-specific naming conventions for weaving certain kinds of data in HTML.

The first line of Listing 3 loads the microformats API, which is needed for anything else to work.

Microformats exist for narrow but common items of data such as contact information and calendar items.

To some, the Semantic Web is the web of data, where information is represented in RDF and OWL.

This has given microformats a great start towards their goal of improving Web microcontent (blogs, for example) publishing in general.

For the document approach we can come at microformats from the structured text side.

That's all there is to microformats.

One problem with microformats is that there isn't a generic way to parse them.

I'll come back to that, but first let's look at how to parse the input if we have already identified it.

Microformats-Based Information Organization and Processing Frame