What are Microformats?
The Web is ever evolving. Technology, trends and methods never stand still, and as such, we at NixonMcInnes like to tinker with our website all the time. Just before Christmas, we took a moment to add some Microformats to our site.
What are Microformats?
As you may know, webpages have a structure that is defined using a markup language — typically HTML. This tells the web browser about the structure of our page and what each bit of content in the web page is for: whether it’s a heading, link or list, for example.
Microformats are patterns that use existing markup standards to describe certain parts of our content in even finer detail. These patterns help make our information machine-readable, which in turn makes it more useful.
Take the address of our office as an example.
On screen you might see the following:
NixonMcInnes
21–22 Old Steine
Brighton BN1 1EL
As a human being, it’s fairly easy to use our judgement and interpret this as an address, based on our experience of how addresses are typically formatted. However, to our browser, this is just a paragraph of text and nothing more.
We can’t provide any more specific information than that, just by using HTML tags, but we are able to specify that this is an address using a Microformat called hCard.
hCard is a Microformat developed for contact details. By using a specific markup pattern, you are able to convey that the text is an address, and what each part of the address represents (like a street address or Post Code).
It is up to you how much information you wish to include for the contact. The only piece of information that is required is a name, so you are not forced to add any information that you do not already have or are not willing to publish on your site.
How is this useful?
As mentioned earlier, using Microformats makes your information machine-readable, and if it is machine-readable, software can gather and use it.
I use an add-on for the Firefox browser called Operator, which lets me know if there is any Microformatted data in the web page I am browsing. If it finds contact details marked up with hCard, for example, it gives me several options for what to do with the data. I could instantly find the address of a restaurant on a mapping site, for example, or I could export a contact to my address book, which would then sync to my phone. Very handy!
There are many other Microformats besides hCard. There is hCalendar for marking up dates and events, XFN to represent relationships between people, geo for geographical co-ordinates, hReview for marking up reviews and hRecipe for recipes, among many others.
Not only can Microformats provide some useful short-cuts for individuals, but search engines are beginning to index them, as well. Having our information marked up in such detail means that it can be easily recognised by the search engines, and added to catalogues of contact details, events, reviews and so on, making it easier for web users to find what they are looking for, and for us to get our useful, accurate, up-to-date information out to the wide World.
We have added hCard to our Contact Us page, and to our individual profile pages. If you fancy seeing Microformats in action, give Operator an install and see what you can do with them.
Barry wrote this on 12.01.09 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Social networks, Web technology box
On January 13th, 2009 at 11:23 pm, EightyOne » Blog Archive » NixonMcInnes: What are Microformats? responded:
[...] first NixonMcInnes blog post since joining in February ‘08 is What are Microformats?. A suitably front-endy subject, I hope you’ll [...]