Sasha Sydoruk

There was a lot of talk recently about microformats. Things like these really intrigue me, so I had to learn more about them.

What is a microformat? It is way to markup certain types of information with the help of HTML attributes, so it is understandable to computers.

Ok, so it is just like XML? Well, not quite. It is very loosely coupled and marked with HTML attributes like these: class, rel and rev.

Aha, I see what you mean… What kind of data can I mark with microformats? I am glad you asked. You can really format any kind of data that is specific to you. Certain types of information are applicable to different industries, so they already have markup defined for them. For example: events, contact information, relationships to other people and others.

Very interesting microformat is rel=”nofollow”. This format tells search engines whether to use this link in determining PageRank or not. There is a really good post that describes how Google works with this format.

All these examples are only beginning of the massive adoption of microformats. I can see how it will be used to markup source code, stock quotes, opinions about certain sites (think trackbacks on steroids), photos, geo location and of course geo tagging.

Ok, all this theoretical stuff is very interesting, but how do I really use this stuff? Here is an example of my contact information marked up with a microformat:

   1:  <div class="vcard">

   2:      <a class="url fn n" href="http://www.sashasydoruk.com/">

   3:          <span class="given-name">Sasha</span>

   4:          <span class="family-name">Sydoruk</span>

   5:      </a>

   6:      <div class="org"><span class="organization-name">ACME Corp.</span></div>

   7:  </div>

and in html it will look like this:

Scott Hanselman has a good post describing implementation of microsummaries and how it is implemented in dasBlog. In his post he mentions that Firefox 2.0 uses microsummary as a description for all the pages that you add to your Favorites. Another example of tools using microformats is Firefox extension Tails. Tails is a microformat reader; everytime it detects a microformat on a page an icon in the traybar lights up and gives you a nice visual view of all detected entities.

Opportunities for microformats are unlimited and I am really interested to see how they evolve.