Last week I had a workshop about Microformats with André Luís sponsored by PrimeIT and Sapo. It was very interesting and really answered some of the questions I had about Microformats.
What are Microformats?
Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.
Which Microformats did I implement in this blog after this workshop?
hAtom is a microformat for identifying semantic information in weblog posts and practically any other place Atom (http://www.atomenabled.org/) may be used, such as news articles. hAtom content is easily added to most blogs by simple modifications to the blog’s template definitions.
Since, as André told us, the new feature of IE8 called Web Slices is based o hAtom, by adding the class
hslice next to the hentry class, now I also support Web Slices!
hCard is a simple, open, distributed format for representing people, companies, organizations, and places, using a 1:1 representation of vCard (RFC2426) properties and values in semantic HTML or XHTML.
xFolk (from “xFolksomony”) is a simple and open format for publishing collections of bookmarks. It better enables services for improving user experience and sharing data in web-based bookmarking software.
I was glad to ear that support for Microformats is growing on the web, and the web browsers are becoming Microformats-aware. According to André, Firefox 3 (or 3.1, I don’t remember) already brings an API for Microformats, although there isn’t any support in the user interface. Maybe in FireFox 4 we’ll get it. And as I said before, IE is supporting one of the Microformats.
There are some web browser plugins that make Microformats usable. For FireFox you can get Operator which will add a toolbar like shown in the picture bellow. You can access the contacts, events, bookmarks, etc available in the current webpage.
For Internet Explorer you can get Oomph, but I wasn’t able to use it with my blog… Well, maybe in the future it will work better.
Adding Microformats support in your blog or website can be pretty simple. It took me about 2 hours in this blog, thanks to a nice base Wordpress theme easily customizable.
Good to know it prompted you to action.
Yes, they’re pretty quick to add. I came over to check you had added the id=”" and hslice class to the hentries, since I didn’t mention that in my presentation. I did, however, mentioned it in the longer version I have up on my blog. I guess you saw that.
Well done!
Oh, I’ve been invited to repeat this at Codebits, but I’ll make a few changes to give a few practical tips on how to consume these pretty easily.
No need to have mad-html-scraping-powers.
See you there?
Sure