“Designed for humans first and machines second”, microformats are HTML based formats for common data types embedded in HTML documents, mostly by using specific values for class or rel attributes. Using microformats makes it easier to publish and reuse various information such as describing people, events, tags and bunch of other relevant information that can be found on the Web.
Now those are some great news for the blogger community.
Microformats are very convenient in use, and such major websites as Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, etc., as well as modern browsers support and constantly use them.
Now that we know what microformats are, let’s find out where to apply them and what popular microformats there are:
hCard is an easy format for presenting contact detail for people, places, companies and other organizations.
hCalendar is a simple open format that is used to mark calendar and other sorts of events. hCalendar is based on iCalendar and can be included into HMTL, XHTML, XML and other markup languages.
Now, that’s a good one. We all like to get an informative review before we buy or commit to something. Just stop and think how many various websites you go to before purchasing something, or even before seeing a movie. Wouldn’t you love it if it all were organized? Well, that’s exactly what hReview does.
Microformat for publishing resumes, provides for 10 main areas of information. Lets you display your resume on your blog, which can be taken from LinkedIn or other source.
How else would we exchange recipes these days? Anytime you want to share or find a recipe, hRecipe is the way to do it. Contains information on ingredients, preparation, etc.
If you have a blog, then you probably use tags. Therefore each post you make has appropriate tags that help you get oriented in the posts of the blog. Tags need to be placed semantically, and that is where relTag comes into play.
If you want to command applications to not follow particular links, then rel-notfollow would come very handy.
These days information is scattered all over the web and we face the dilemma of finding the appropriate content through numerous websites. Thanks to the microformats, in the future the browsers will be capable to associate semantically added data with various applications. For example, it will not take much effort to add personal data into the application that manages your contacts.
If you have good examples of microformats being used, you are more than welcome to share them!
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