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Microformats and Standardized Markup

Quite some time ago there was discussion on many web development sites on standardizing various forms of markup. One thing that has come about 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. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging).

In essence it is just xhtml markup standardized so that it can be easily parsed. Most likely you’ve already used some such as rel=”tag” for your tags. If you read my Getting Things Done post then you may have noticed that my book review also had special markup. This markup is the hReview format.

The power of these formats are more apparent when you see some of the applications. For example you can use a XSLT file to transform hCalendar and hCards into their respective iCalendar/vCard formats which then can be used with your favorite desktop app. Some popular sites such as Odeo and Upcoming.org already use microformats. With a handy greasemonkey script you can easily subscribe to events on any site that uses the format. Some example sites are Lesser Known Holidays and even a conference schedule. If your designing a site for an upcoming conference you might want to think about using such formats to help people reuse your data. To get an idea of what is really possible then you should take a look at MagicLine for greasemonkey which takes advantage of these formats to create a searchable cache of information.

The possible uses of this in library land are already coming up such as the COinS and OpenURL as discussed on Outgoing. If your redesigning your library website you might also look into using microformats for your event list or even your contact information so people can easily download it. Just one more way of easily pushing services.

Technorati Tags: library, marketing, microformats, services

Good stuff. I’m embarrassed to say that I just learned of hReview recently, but proud to say I love the concept.

Since so many things in libraries are database driven, we should pay attention to these microformat standards so that we can make sure our templates support them.

On the other hand, is it going too far to add hReview markup to blog comments?

[...] If you haven’t already looked into microformats, I recommend doing so. Microformats in the simplest term is standardized markup. You markup things with specific tags, class names, etc and this allows people to create parsers to extract the information. I’ve also written about this before at my blog. The power of this becomes apparent when more people adopt it. To quote Mark Pilgrim (who is writing some of the parsers for microformats): Imagine having your own private database of every person you’ve ever stumbled across online, and being able to download their vCards into your address book. And every event, which you can download into iCal/Sunbird/Outlook. Plus a list of all the Creative Commons-licensed content you’ve ever read, which you can repurpose — legally, according to the terms of the license. Now imagine searching such a database. And subscribing to your search results as a syndicated feed. [...]

[...] Oliver Brown introduced me to microformats a while ago, the Ryan Eby got excited about them, then COinS-PMH showed how useful they could be for libraries, but I still haven’t done anything with them myself (other than beg Peter Binkley to release his COinS-PMH WordPress Plugin). [...]