I have been reading about microformats in various blogs for a while, but only recently decided to go and see what they actually were. I'm a believer. Here is an example from the hCalendar microformat:
Web 2.0 Conference: October 5- 7, at the Argent Hotel, San Francisco, CA
It's just a snippet of xhtml, but it has embedded machine-readable markup, as follows:
<span class="vevent"> <a class="url" href="https://www.web2con.com/"> <span class="summary">Web 2.0 Conference</span>: <abbr class="dtstart" title="2005-10-05">October 5</abbr>- <abbr class="dtend" title="2005-10-08">7</abbr>, at the <span class="location">Argent Hotel, San Francisco, CA</span> </a> </span>
The same information could have been encoded in a separate calendar file or into hidden metadata in the xhtml, however the microformat approach allows the data to be written once in a visually verifiable way rather than repeating it in several different places. Using this method the human and the machine are looking at the same input and processing it in different ways.
Here is my quick summary of how to use a microformat in your html document, summarised from the hCalendar design principles:
- Use standard xhtml markup, just as you would if you weren't applying a microformat
- Add <span> or <div> tags for data that isn't naturally held within appearance-affecting markup
- Use class attributes on the relevant xhtml nodes for your data
- Where the machine readable data really can't be displayed as is, use <abbr> tags and insert the machine-readble form in the title attribute
Ian Davis has been working on a microformat for rdf. This neatly allows the microformat approach to be applied to foaf data and other rdf models. To demonstrate how cool this is I've embedded some foaf and dublin core metadata into my blog main page. You can access this data directly with an appropriate parser, or take advantage of Ian's online extractor to read the metadata in a more traditional rdf-in-xml encoding.
Benjamin