{"id":91,"date":"2007-12-03T12:00:26","date_gmt":"2007-12-03T17:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/2007\/the-power-of-microformats\/"},"modified":"2007-11-28T21:27:46","modified_gmt":"2007-11-29T02:27:46","slug":"the-power-of-microformats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/2007\/the-power-of-microformats\/","title":{"rendered":"The power of microformats"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Considering<\/a> A few months ago I attended a really interesting talk by Eric Meyer<\/a> where he touched on the use of microformats.\u00a0 You might know Eric from his excellent O’Reilly Press CSS books.<\/p>\n

What are microformats?\u00a0 Before giving an example, I’ll give a little context.\u00a0 When Tim Berners-Lee created the web, he tried to make HTML simple, flexible, and meaningful.\u00a0 He succeeded on the first two counts but the third was quickly left by the wayside – many designers didn’t care what a particular tag meant, so long as it could be used for page layout.\u00a0 The use of tables to arrange graphic elements instead of holding tabular data is a perfect example.<\/p>\n

So Berners-Lee has been talking for years about the next step – the semantic web.\u00a0 In the semantic web, tags are used to say what a particular piece of content is, with all styling done with stylesheets.\u00a0 There is, of course, more to the semantic web than just separating content and presentation, after all you can work that way with HTML and CSS now.\u00a0 One other key component is the web of trust, where people and web sites are able to describe relationships to each other so that search engines can help you find trustworthy content automatically.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the semantic web has not really taken off.\u00a0 There have been lots of meetings and XML schemas but it’s all too complicated, the process is too bureaucratic, and everything is being designed from the top down.<\/p>\n

This is where microformats come in.\u00a0 Let’s say you have a blog and you’ve tagged all your articles.\u00a0 You’d like to let search engines and aggregators like Technorati know what your tags are.\u00a0 But HTML doesn’t have anything like this:<\/p>\n

<tag>semantic web<tag><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So what do you do?\u00a0 Simple, use the rel-tag microformat<\/a>:<\/p>\n

<a href=”http:\/\/example.com\/tag\/semantic+web” rel=”tag”>semantic web<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The microformat makes use of existing html tags and attributes and just follows simple conventions.\u00a0 But now that this little bit of meaning can be interpreted by spiders and other programs, we’ve actually added a pretty powerful bit of functionality to the web.<\/p>\n

Most blog software, including WordPress, includes does microformatting for you.\u00a0 If install my tag cloud plugin Altocumulous<\/a>, and view source, you can see for yourself.<\/p>\n

For intranet purposes, the hCard<\/a> and hCalendar<\/a> microformats look promising.\u00a0 Take a look at microformats.org to see why I think so.\u00a0 I’ll write more on it later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few months ago I attended a really interesting talk by Eric Meyer where he touched on the use of microformats.\u00a0 You might know Eric from his excellent O’Reilly Press CSS books. What are microformats?\u00a0 Before giving an example, I’ll give a little context.\u00a0 When Tim Berners-Lee created the web, he tried to make HTML […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,118,18],"tags":[30,145,37,106,95,115,46,110],"class_list":["post-91","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-programming","category-web-design","tag-intranets","tag-microformats","tag-semantic-web","tag-tagging","tag-trust","tag-web-standards","tag-web-development","tag-wordpress"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}