Notes from Microformats Session

Topics to Cover

AUDIO: MF-barcamp_08_26_2006.ogg

Why

• Why were microformats created?

Basics

• Read/parse/write microformats
• What kinds of data can be represented?

Developers / Practical Issues

• Events in blog posts, etc.
• HTML is hard to parse
• Why use HTML instead of "XML"
• When not to use microformats

What's New

• What's new in microformats
• Process? Contributions?
• Where is microformats heading? What's the vision?
• Progress on Microformats zen garden?
• Current developments / media types

Session Notes

Why were they created?

• HTML is widely understood
• HTML is universal to read and port
• There's room to build on top of HTML
• Can embed rich, structured data into a web page that's both human & machine readable
• Use accepted solutions (like vCard) to create Microformats that work for the web (hCard)
• It's better to have accurate, visible data than arbitrary invisible data
• BetaThetaPi EDUCamp October 19th 2007

How to Use Microformats

• Example: using hCard
• Example: marking up blogrolls using hCard and XFN
• One important reason to use HTML is the ability to add multiple classnames (as opposed to XML)<a href="http://www.agtile.com">countertops</a>
• You can use rel="me" to aggregate different parts of your identity (see also XFN Identity Consolidation
• You can use document fragments (http://www.yourname.com/contacts.html#friends) to specify specific contacts or sets of your contacts

Parsing

• There are many libraries to parse HTML
• Every microformat has a root elements, you can pull classnames out of the root elements. See hCard parsing for example.
• There are some special cases (check for URL in HREF first).

Why use HTML

• Part of the culture of information as things on the web
• Every single piece of content you create has the potential to be shared on the Web
• Ex: chat transcripts wrapped in < pre > because there's no standard chat format (who's saying what, etc.) Using HTML would be an instant way of sharing.
• Ex: iCalendar support via using hCalendar translation to .ics stream -- it's less work to just do it via HTML and Microformats than to do .ics support directly

Markup up Events

• Ex: go to barcamp.org and check out the Subscribe to hCalendar link, view the source<a href="http://www.svt.pl">pozycjonowanie</a>
• See the hCalendar creator

When Not to Use Microformats

• When there isn't an established standard, or wide range of existing behavior
• If you're doing something very specific or esoteric
• In those cases, mark up as semantically as you can to build up an existing repository

Picoformats

• By simply using punctuation, using @ signs, etc., you can embed semantics in very short content.

Microformats Zen Garden

• All microformats use the same class names, so:
• If people create stylesheets to make Microformts pretty, they can be reused.

Process

• Check out the process page on the Wiki

(more notes...)

Barcamp Stanford

Microformats

Tantek Celik

• Microformats = HTML, slightly extended

• Anyone who knows HTML can learn Microformats in under an hour!

Things people want to learn about today:

What's new?

• Events in blogpostings
• Read/parse/write
• What kinds of data can be represented?
• HTML it hard to parse
• Why use HTML instead of "XML"?
• Community process? Contributions?
• So many standards to choose from...
• When NOT to use microformats?
• Picoformats
• Microformats "Zen garden"
• Media/audio/video
• When is it heading? Vision?
• Why were they created?

Example of microformat markup:

<div class="vcard">

<div class="fn">Tantek Celik<div>

<a class="url" href="http://tantek.com">My site</a>

<a class="email" href="mailto:asdf@example.com">My email</a>

</div>