Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0
Microformats have been generating buzz on the web lately. The whole idea of microformats originated at the 2004 South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference in Austin, TX. A panel was presented by Tantek Çelik on extending XHTML by adding meta information to existing attributes to create the XHTML Friends Network, or XFN.
Since then, they have slowly gained a following as tools have become available to create, read and detect microformats like hCard and hCal. Recently, John Allsopp of Westciv fame published Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0. Until the release of this book, the most comprehensive information about microformats was found at Microformats.org. However, they are written with a heavy technical slant and can be difficult for some people to pickup and use. This book serves as a comprehensive guide to microformats, exploring why we need them, how they work, and what problems they can help solve.
Allsopp begins by detailing the origins of microformats and talking about the important role that semantic HTML and XHTML plays in microformats. He has split the book into four parts, with the largest chunk focusing on the different microformats available and how to use them. He covers each microformat in its own chapter, beginning with the link-based microformats and moving through location, contact information, event information, review and resume information, and finally syndication. He also devotes an entire chapter to the XFN since that is what started it all.
Aside from the various types of microformats, Allsopp includes case studies of web startup Cork’d and Yahoo, both of which are using microformats heavily in their sites.
With the creation of extensions for browsers like Tails for Firefox and support for microformats in future versions of IE and other browsers, microformats are about to become an integral part of web site development. This book can help you on your way.
