If you regularly keep tabs on hot topics in the web industry, chances you’ve run across micro formats , which seem to be on the tip of every Web designer/ developer’s tongue these days.
Because of their amazing power and simplicity, microformats have been the subject of countless articles in online and print publications, conference presentations , panel discussions, and a book by John Allsopp, Microformats:Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 (http://microformatique.com/book/), published by Friends of Ed. Although we’ll get a brief primer to the subject, if you are absolutely new to microformats you may want to get yourself up to speed quickly by reading Allsopp’s informative article called “Add Microformats Magic to Your Site”(http://www.thinkvitamin.com /features/design/how-to-use-microformats ) on the popular web design ezine Vitamin. Brian Suda, a microformats guru, has written another great introductory article on the subject called “Microformats: More Meaning from Your Markup” (http://www.sitepoint.com/article / microformats-meaning-markup) published on Sitepoint.
In a nutshell, microformats can be defined as a series of standardized methods for making up common content using simple, semantic HTML and CSS class names in order to allow machines to read and understand data that might otherwise be intelligible only to humans. Though the heart of microformats is really nothing more than the HTML and CSS that you probably already know, they deliver great potential power and convenience for users and Web applications. Microformats allow content on a website to be ported to other applications with ease, resulting in increased use of the information they describe.
To better understand the value of microformats, consider this scenario . Imagine you’ve built a site to promote a popular band, and have created a page with the complete touring schedule , and write down on paper the time, date , location, and other relevant info for later reference. Many fans misplace the paper of simply forget about the show they were so excited about earlier , they don’t go to the show, and the band misses out on ticket sales.
If the schedule information had been built to be portable, it could have been quickly downloaded to a PDA, mobile phone, MP3 player, or ported to an online calendar system with the click of a button. This is the magic of microformats, which serves as the API (Application Programming Interface) to the content of your site , providing unprecedented interoperability between platform. When data like a band’s tour schedule is marked up in a standardized format, it’s a piece of cake to make it portable, as computers can then recognize specific types of content that would otherwise be indistinguishable from any other text. Applications could send it to other applications knowing which text is the date, and which text is the event name. When information is packaged in a way that is portable, users can move it to a location where it won’t be lost. This is a perfect illustration of how findability is more than just search engine optimization , it’s about finding the information you want when you want it.
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Comments ( 3 )
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Dec 25 09 at
11:52 am
