A Look at Microformats
Tantek Celik addresses a sea of laptops.
Tantek Celik of Technorati and Microformats.org gave a presentation on open data formats for sharing personal contact information and calendar data. The best part of his talk centered on the microformats for ID and events, hCard and hCalendar.
An hCard accomplishes the same thing a vCard does — click on an hCard on somebody's web page and you can add that person to your address book in an instant — except it does it using semantic XHTML. People are starting to use the hCard standard on their contact pages or profile pages, including the wild and crazy Steve Martin.
The hCalendar microformat is used to markup event information. Basically, what hCard does for people, hCalendar does for events. Click on an event and it gets added to your hCalendar-compatible calendaring application. Most web calendars and desktop calendars have support for these microformats.
Microformats.org has FAQs, examples and creation tools for various open data models — VoteLinks and hReview for gathering opinions, XFN for identifying friends in social networks, and rel-tag for building folksonomies. They also maintain a blog where they track developments and changes.
