What is a microformat?
A Microformat cannot be defined as easily as something like a web browser, where there is a concrete definition of the object, but rather by its use. The concept of a Microformat might be best seen as a subset of an existing technology focusing on solving a specific problem or an open source data format that can be used to solve a problem. They are not defined as a specific piece of data, like a word processing document, but more for a problem they help to solve. For example, xml is a specification for dealing with data. It provides a summary and some detail about the data it describes. This makes the data accessible by many more platforms and keeps it very loosely coupled with specific applications. The broad scope of xml does not make it a microformat, however a smaller subset of tools within xml might be a microformat. The microformat comes into play when a specific task is solved by using a smaller subset of existing tools. Presentations are going online everyday, this makes them e
A Microformat (sometimes abbreviated μF or uF) is a way of adding simple semantic meaning to human-readable content which is otherwise, from a machine’s point of view, just plain text. They allow data items such as events, contact details or locations, on HTML (or XHTML) web pages, to be meaningfully detected and the information in them to be extracted by software, and indexed, searched for, saved or cross-referenced, so that it can be reused or combined. More technically, they are items of semantic mark up, using just standard (X)HTML with a set of common class-names. They are open and available, freely, for anyone to use.
On May 6, 2007, at 9:32 AM, Keith Alexander wrote: >> Indeed, there are already microformats, such as “nofollow”, which we >> recognise as such, but which do not appear to have followed that >> process. >> > Given that, I’d perhaps redefine a ‘Microformat’ as an HTML > convention (can something like ‘nofollow’ be called a ‘data > format’?) endorsed by the Microformats community. (I’ve never much liked rel-nofollow, so I’m largely biased when I say this:) I think it would be a mistake to redefine microformats such that rel-nofollow doesn’t stand out. The open issues in rel-nofollow [1] strongly suggest it’s not really a microformat at all. The issues are, basically: 1) the semantics are wrong, 2) the name is wrong, 3) it doesn’t solve a real problem, and 4) it creates new problems. I’d say that makes it almost the antithesis of a microformat. [1] http://microformats.
