Talking microformats at UNM
You've probably heard of 'em, but are still wondering -- what are microformats and is anyone using them?
Albuquerque's own Emily Lewis is currently authoring a book on microformats and spent a morning recently sharing what she knows with a group of web professionals at UNM.
Following is a summary and some helpful links.
But really, you should go check out her presentation: Introduction to Microformats
What are microformats?
Microformats enable the re-use of your web content by adding a layer of meaning to its formatting.
Or as some say... they're "markup, with more meaning."
Emily describes them more thoroughly in her presentation:
Microformats are sets of HTML attributes and values that are applied to common web content — people, events, blog posts, reviews, tags — so that content can be extracted by software and indexed, searched for, saved, cross-referenced or combined.
Who's using microformats?
Emily's presentation contains a longer list but I'm personally interested in event markup so it's interesting to know that both Eventful and Upcoming are using microformats to heighten findability and reuse of their event listings.
It's also good to see that systems like Plone have embraced microformats for their event systems and more.
Where to learn more
- Microformatique: A blog about microformats and "data at the edges"
- Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0
- Oomph: A Microformats Toolkit
- Or, even better, watch for Emily's upcoming book on Microformats
- In the meantime, here's the presention: Introduction to Microformats
