Webmaster 101

You will probably have an idea that micrformats is something like a component in the Web 2.0 flash-in-the-pan movement. But this is not something so simple. Neither a trademark nor a fancy name lets see what is “microformat” The microformat can be see here microformats.org web site which is the official website for it which defines microformats as:-

“Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.”

Publishers can encode semantics as additions to the HTML markup of web pages thought these highly adopted standards. The pages beyond and above the face value can thus me mashed up, remixed and consumed. The simplest example can be the addition of a semantic markup in a website that has a description of an upcoming event. These properties can be so easily be extracted to make use in services like software, calendars, personal organizers etc.

In microformats, semantic information that is encoded within a web page can be leveraged in some ways that were completely out of the imagination sphere of the original publisher. It is not a new idea to put extra information directly into an HTML, it has been over ten years that this is under discussion, but it is not that the idea is becoming a reality because of the efforts of so many volunteers, support, sufficient documentation, code libraries and tools which have been created to generate so that significant momentum can be generated behind microformats.

By now the dreaming in your eyes must have started and you will try and rush to YouTube, wait, the part two of this article will show you the extreme simplicity of using microformats, the hard part is limited only to the addition of a class name to one single HTML element. The least effort can give the most benefit.

People and events are now two of the most prevalent forms of data being published by use of microformats.

Filed under: General