Microformats, Making your Content a Little More Useful

Published: 2007-07-29

Microformating is a tidy new way to markup your XHTML content making it more useful for consumption by machines.  The markup is designed to sit on top of your existing XHTML so there is no visual difference, as defined on microformats.org, they are ‘Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards’.

Practical example - hcard

Take the following code, a fairly standard method of marking up a contact name with a link to their website.

<ul>
   <li>
     <a href="http://www.coffeerings.co.uk">
        John Walker
     </a>
   </li>
</ul> 

Using microformatting we can extend the markeup to provide much more meaning without changing the original output. The following addition of the 'class' attribute will alert any microformat reader that the hCard belonds to the 'John Walker' and that their website is 'http://www.coffeerings.co.uk'.

<ul>
   <li>
     <a href="http://www.coffeerings.co.uk" 
       class="url fn">
        John Walker
     </a>
   </li>
</ul> 

• 'url' relates to the 'a' tags 'href' attribute.
• 'fn' relates to the value of the 'a' tag.

More Information

http://microformats.org/
http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-cheatsheet

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