Khal Weir

Microformats are additional markup that add semantics to content in web pages; their aim is so to improve the way information can be searched, extracted,  indexed,  cross-referenced or combined by software by describing content. A good example of this is hCard, heres some basic contact information in plain HTML : [sourcecode language=’html’]

[/sourcecode] with that addition of the hCard microformat markup becomes [sourcecode language=’html’] [/sourcecode] With the hCard markup this information has become more useful, the content has context making it easier to be automatically processed or extracted for use in applications like Outlook or Address Book (hCard is the web based equivalent of the vCard format). Other Microformats include hReview,  hCalendar, hResume and hRecipe, take a look at  http://microformats.org/ for more information. One of the principles of Microformats is that they should ‘be presentable and parsable, visible data is much better for humans than invisible metadata’; this definitely seems to be the direction the web is going in as Google recently announced they ignore keywords in meta tags and Apple, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have incorporated support for microformats some of their webapps; as have popular social networking sites such as digg, facebook, last.fm, linkedin, twitter. Another interesting use of Microformats is the XFN (XHMTL friend network), this was the first microformat and is used to describe the relationship between individual’s and their various online presences. Its really simple and consists of two attributes.

• rel=”me” - this is used to show that the link is related to yourself (eg the links from this blog to my twitter profile page)
• rel=”friend” - this can be used to describe relationships between people when linking (eg the links from this blog to my friend’s blogs), this tag can also be stuffed with context such as ‘co-worker, met, acquaintance, colleague, child’.

Take a look at http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/docs/ for more information and to try some example applications (try inputing blog.khalweir.co.uk for example).