What I see as an extension of his panel Creating Building Blocks for Independents, Tantek Çelik discusses microformats, a building block which has been around for the past two years.

Though the web is a humongous pool of information, a lot of information we put up fall under very similar categories. Events and contact information are only two examples. Microformats are about establishing conventions for these pockets of information so that the data published is readable and usable across different platforms and applications. And in most cases all it takes is using the appropriate class on existing HTML tags.

For example, an hCard microformat looks like:

<div class="vcard">
<a class="url fn" href="http://websg.org/">Lucian Teo</a>
<div class="org">Websg.org</div>
<div class="adr">
<div class="street-address">6505 i-35 North</div>
<span class="locality">Austin</span>,
<span class="region">TX</span>
<span class="postal-code">35263</span>
</div>
<div class="tel">502-352-5362</div>
</div>

and displays like so:

There’s even an hCard creator you can use to make your own microformatted hCard.

hCards (h here stands for HTML, as I was told by Ryan King who works at Technorati) are only one example of a highly-used microformat. If you look at Jeremy Keith’s little SXSW party app, you’ll see that it’s no different from any normal web page, except for the genius of an implemetation with Googlemaps. But below the page you can download the iCal and vCard files. These files are generated by pointing the web address of the page to a iCal or vCard converter. The microformats located in the HTML will be processed into the appropriate files for your download.

So there’s no need to create a separate iCal file, FTP it up to your server and link it. All you need do is code your HTML in the appropriate microformat. Reusability. Code once, use in as many places as you like. This reduces data inconsistency as well.

Needless to say, I’m stoked about microformats because it addresses lot of stuff I face at work. I hate migrating information, and microformats gives me information that is extremely portable.

Related Links:

• Tantek’s slides for the panel
• Tails, the Firefox extension that reads the commonly-used microformats