What are Microformats and how are they the future ?

January 3, 2007 at 8:41 pm | In Web 2.0, gyaan | 7 Comments

Microformat

I found this blog by Alex Faaborg from mozilla, on mocroformats and what they are. Well, I have been reading up on microformats a lot recently and I really feel it will get a big push once peopel realise the power it encompasses.

Microformats are sections in code that hold not syntactic but semantic meaning in them. For example if I were to put in this code in a page

<div class=”vcard”>
<span class=”fn”>Ritesh M Nayak</span>
<div class=”org”>Technayak</div>
<div class=”adr”>
<div class=”street-address”>Blah Blah blah </div>
<span class=”locality”>Bangalore</span>,
<span class=”region”>Karnataka</span>,
<span class=”postal-code”>560080</span>
<span class=”country-name”>India</span>
</div>
<div class=”tel”>9886768538</div>

Its not just HTML but its semantic HTML, it has real world entites that can be directly mapped to a contacts application or an organiser perhaps. This can eb translated toa standard format for dispaying contact information, in other words the hCard format.

Alex also goes on to write abotu the importance of Microformats and some of them hold tremendous possiblities. In short imagine a contact microformat is associated with your outlook, socionet with your favorite socionet, an event card with yoru favorite event management tool. The possibilites are endless.

- for aggregation : Rather than you puttign information on sites, the sites crawl and pick up information in microformats. For example, if you are selling something, then you put a SaleCard in your blog or profile and a crawler picks it up.
- For sharing: Just like in RSS , you can share links, bookmarks, information about entites using Microformats.
- For searches : Searching becomes more simpler with formats dictating content. So if you search for events in Bangalore city, you can search for EventCards with location as Bangalore. Life becomes that much more simpler.

Such is the power of microformats, something that will be in teh highlight this year. If you want to get involved in the microformats community, visit this link.
Firefox 3 iwill be the first browser to probably push this concept.

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Microformats are definitely something that can further push standards on the web. It will be interesting to see how much support they get.. Unfortunately, 3rd party (browsers and web site applications) support could make or break them.

Let’s hope that they are better and more quickly supported then CSS was/is.

Good post.

Comment by bogeywebdesign — January 4, 2007 #
Implementing something like hcard in an application is pretty simple. However, they will start appearing, when compelling consumers start to appear.

One worry about information such as hcard readable by programs will be misuse and spam. Any pointers to what people think of this?

Comment by jaypullur — January 4, 2007 #
Hey Jay, I think the solution to spam attacks would be to provide a sort of an authentication key to each browser or application, by a big brother app. The data in microformats can be encrypted and can only be decrypted using these hashes. That way we can ensure that only browsers, crawlers and other legal entities can read the microformat data. how does that sound?

Comment by itsmeritesh — January 4, 2007 #
Sounds good. But hardly practical.Its too centralized. Considering the size of the web, it cant be managed by one single person/organisation.

Also, the person who creates the microformat also needs to know the hash key right?? That entitles just about anyone who creates a website to know the key. Well, I see a problem there..
I think that such concepts should catch fire only with co-operative acceptance by the society. And like most social solutions, microformats will come with its own set of problems….like misuse.:-)

Comment by Prateeksha — January 6, 2007 #
[...] data and many more application specific formats. Information on the Web is in JSON, REST , XML , Microformats etc. With this vareity in data formats and representations comes the inherent need for flexibility [...]

Pingback by Are days of the RDBMS numbered ? « TechNayak(mirror) — December 19, 2007 #
[...] data and many more application specific formats. Information on the Web is in JSON, REST , XML , Microformats etc. With this vareity in data formats and representations comes the inherent need for flexibility [...]

Pingback by TechNayak » Are days of the RDBMS numbered ? — December 22, 2007 #
Very nice!!

Comment by numsDync — August 3, 2008 #