Windows Toolkit Gives Oomph to Microformats
No need to wait for Internet Explorer 8 to benefit from Microformats support. The Microsoft evangelists at MIX Online have released Oomph, a toolkit for creating, styling and consuming microformats.
There are three pieces to the toolkit:
- An Internet Explorer add-in, which recognizes microformats and places the green microformats logo in the upper left of the screen.
- A cross-browser JavaScript file that does the same thing as the IE add-in, but only for the page it’s on. The MIX team put together this example.
- A Windows Live Writer plug-in, which helps people add microformats to blog posts without having to write the code. It even contains an event search, for slurping up event info already input by someone else.
To someone at the front of the Microformat wave, this may not seem innovative. Then, Windows development rarely it at the forefront of new technologies. There is still a lot of room for Microformats to grow and serious adoption by the “IE-erati” is a good sign for the future.
What would be really be cool is if the MIX team incorporated its JavaScript into a Greasemonkey script, which would bring the same auto-discovery of the IE add-in to Firefox (and other browsers supporting Greasemonkey-like tools).
Of course, there are already Firefox plugins and Greasemonkey scripts that allow similar views of Microformats. The IE-specific stuff is the biggest boon, because it’s bringing Microformats to people who didn’t have much access to it previously.
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