My presentation at the second meetup of WebSG.
It was March of 2003 and I spent the better part of the night standing next to Matt Mullenweg. He was explaining the XFN microformat and for that brief moment I kinda got it, then lost it.
I went to the Microformats site to find out what it was all about. The site said that microformats were:
- 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.
Much as I hated to admit it, I understood none of the above.
I’m not sure if it’s a Singaporean thing, but it dawned on me we were asking the wrong question. Instead of asking “What are microformats?”, we need to ask “What do microformats do?”.
Building Blocks
A lot of the information on the web is made up of smaller, commonplace blocks of information. For example, almost all corporate websites are made up of similar blocks of information: an “About Us” page, or contact information for readers to reach a company representative. All blogs are made up of blog posts. E-commerce sites often have products, and ticketing sites have events, which are in turn made up of smaller blocks like time and venue.
If we marked out these blocks of information in a way we could identify them, there would be a sorting of information on the world-wide web. If I placed some form of identification for all contact information on the web, I could write a search engine that searches only contact information. That would effectively give me a world-wide yellow pages without the pain of collecting information.
Add a bit of class
Most microformats utilise the “class” attribute to insert these identifiers. A typical chunk of contact information on the web is coded as such:
<p>Lucian Teo<br />
Ministry of Education<br />
(65) 91262795<p>
If you were to put it in an hcard microformat, the code would be:
<p class="vcard">
<span class="fn">Lucian Teo</span><br />
<span class="org">Ministry of Education</span><br />
<span class="tel">(65) 91262795</span>
</p>
Just the addition of a few classes marks this out as a hcard microformat. Now a host of hcard applications out there are able to tap on the contact information you just put on your website. For example, the Firefox extension Smartzilla is now able to read the hcard off your website and allow you to store the contact information in your addressbook.
Other microformats
The hcard is just one example. There are many, many microformats out there; some already widely used and others still in development.
hCalendar is a microformat for calendar events. XFN allows you to specify the relationships you have with people you link to - whether they are an acquaintance or colleague, whether you have met them or not. The adoption of XFN has an immense implication on the mapping of the social web via world-wide web hyperlinks. There are quite a lot more microformats, but you can go read the list yourself.
Current adoption of microformats
Microformats are being adopted. Yahoo! Local has tagged approximately 15 million business listings as hcards, the events of that these businesses organise as hcalendar events and customer reviews of these businesses as hreviews. Flickr began geotagging photos with the geo microformat.
Like I mentioned earlier, the widespread use of microformats will create a sortable web, instead of one in which we are subject to “I’m feeling lucky” searches. Microformats yield immense implications for the future of the web.