Web Directions

Microformats — John Allsopp

• In: notes
• By:Andrew
• September 28, 2006
• Leave a response

How can tech­nol­ogy make people’s lives better?

John has a 10 month old daugh­ter; he doesn’t get out much. He wants to see a movie, but what good movies are out right now?

• Centralized solu­tions — Someone owns this data, we have to trust them not to be biased.
• Search – 38,000,000 results for the movie title, first 30 con­tained no reviews
• Standardized data for­mats help soft­ware under­stand what we mean – seman­tic markup.
• Standardized data allows more mashups – com­bin­ing maps with info about peo­ple has already proven very popular
• Open source, open stan­dards for doc­u­ment for­mats get­ting more impor­tant and more pop­u­lar. Open data is the next step; an impor­tant step at that.
• You pub­lish in one for­mat, I pub­lish in another – the result is nei­ther of us can make use of each other’s data.
• Formal stan­dards take a long time to be adopted, if they ever are. “So many car­casses lit­ter the road to XHTML and XML”
• Web has devel­oped as an evo­lu­tion­ary process – build upon what we already have. This is the approach micro­for­mats have taken
• Microformats work with exist­ing tools and exist­ing devel­op­ment prac­tices. Encourage decen­tral­ized devel­op­ment and con­tent. Distributed data.
• Current micro­for­mats: hCard (vCard), hCal­en­dar (iCal), hRe­view, hList­ings for clas­si­fieds; many more.
• Tag micro­for­mat has become very pop­u­lar – you can point to an inter­nal tag­space, or use an exter­nal ser­vice such as Technorati
• Big sites are start­ing to adopt micro­for­mats – Yahoo Tech has started using hRe­view for prod­uct reviews. Reviewers of prod­ucts listed in hCards
• Web Directions South and North sites are micro­for­mat rich – hCal­en­dar, hCard, tag etc.
• Cork’d and upcom​ing​.org are more exam­ples of real world use of microformats.
• FireFox Talis exten­sion offers a great way of find­ing embed­ded microformats
• Brian Suda has writ­ten a ser­vice that takes hCards with GEO data and cre­ates a Google Maps mashup. (sends KML to GMaps API)
• Microformats allow new solu­tions – the more micro­for­mat­ted data we have, more options will present themselves.
• Shows exam­ple of hCard; while the content-​​to-​​code ration drops, it’s for a good rea­son – we’re mak­ing the con­tent more use­ful to machines. Shows con­vert­ing of hCard to vCard to allow import into address book using a web ser­vice. John demon­strates import­ing entire Web Directions pro­gram into iCal.
• sure, I’m a geek; but that’s COOL
• More infor­ma­tion – micro​for​mats​.org, micro​for​ma​tique​.com. John has a book com­ing out in early 2007

2 responses to “Microformats — John Allsopp”:

1. • By:WD06 - Day 3 Musings at Mad Web Blog
   • October 2nd, 2006

   […] John Allsopp fol­lowed the break with his talk on micro­for­mats: a term which has been knocked about the blogs a fair bit recently, how­ever mean­ing very lit­tle to me. I was deter­mined to be informed, and John did an excel­lent job. Using micro­for­mats is a great idea, and being so easy to imple­ment, theres no excuse not to use them. […]

2. • By:Web Directions 2006 - Lachy’s Log
   • December 14th, 2006

   […] Thursday, 2006-​​09-​​28, was day 1 of the con­fer­ence. The most enjoy­able pre­sen­ta­tions for me were Jeremy Keith’s Explaining Ajax (fea­tur­ing a sexy, and rather hairy, top­less photo of Cameron Adams) and John Allsopp’s Microformats. Derek also pre­sented on acces­si­bil­ity, which was also good, but it was almost a sub­set of the top­ics addressed in his work­shop, with only a few new points. […]

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