Get Started with Microformats
Created primarily for the user and secondary for machines, microformats are a set of simple formats built upon 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).
Microformats are tiny patterns in HTML to interpret commonly used things like people, events, blog posts, reviews and tags in web pages; the fastest and simplest way to provide feeds and APIs for the information in your website.
Microformats are a way of adding simple markup to human-readable data items such as events, contact details or locations, on web pages, so that the information in them can be extracted by software and indexed, searched for, saved, cross-referenced or combined.
More technically, they are items of semantic markup, using just standard plain old semantic (X)HTML with a set of common class names and “rel” values. They are open and available, freely, for anyone to use.
Microformats are:
- A way of thinking about data
- Design principles for formats
- Adapted to current behaviors and usage patterns
- Highly correlated with semantic XHTML
- A set of simple open data format standards for more structured blogging & microcontent publishing.
Microformats are not:
- A new language
- Infinitely extensible and open-ended
- An attempt to get everyone to change their behavior and rewrite their tools
- A whole new approach that throws away what already works today
- A panacea for all taxonomies, ontologies, and other such abstractions
Check out Microformats Specifications
