Tutorial ‘O The Day: XHTML Microformats
Yesterday we looked at creating semantically correct XHTML. Today’s tutorial takes that idea and goes a step further into what’s know as microformats.
Microformats allow browsers and other user agents to “understand” certain chunks of data, for instance hCard, a microformat based on the vCard standard, tells a browser that the information contained within the hCard tags is an address card.
Microformats are, to quote from the microformats.org website:
- a way of thinking about data
- design principles for formats
- adapted to current behaviors and usage patterns (“Pave the cow paths.”)
- highly correlated with semantic XHTML, AKA the real world semantics, AKA lowercase semantic web, AKA lossless XHTML
- a set of simple open data format standards that many are actively developing and implementing for more/better structured blogging and web microcontent publishing in general.
- An evolutionary revolution
- all the above.
Right now Flickr, Yahoo and others are using microformats and Mozilla has said the next version of Firefox will support microformats.
For some more background and to get started creating your own microformats code head over the official site and have a look at the various code generators and templates. Happy formatting.
