Microformats
Philip Tellis
Yahoo!
Wayback when
- Tim Berners-Lee developed the web to be a semantic network of interlinked documents
- Open standards (HTTP and HTML) helped it grow
- Couldn't do much
The loss of semantics
- Netscape added the image tag
- FONT, MARQUEE, BLINK
- OMG
- Web pages made in photoshop
Hey, that's not markup
- Links to non-markup documents (.doc, .xls, .pdf)
- HTML was meant to do all that in a readable way
And that isn't semantic either
- Tables for layout
- H* tags for font sizing and bolding
- B tag for headings
There are still sites that do this!
The return of semantics
- HTML 4.x deprecated a whole bunch of non-semantic tags
- Accessibility standards call for the appropriate use of certain tags and the omission of others
- Browsers stabilised
- Many respected web developers pushed for standards and semantics
The return of semantics
- HTML 4.x deprecated a whole bunch of non-semantic tags
- Accessibility standards call for the appropriate use of certain tags and the omission of others
- Browsers stabilised
- Many respected web developers pushed for standards and semantics
The return of semantics
- HTML 4.x deprecated a whole bunch of non-semantic tags
- Accessibility standards call for the appropriate use of certain tags and the omission of others
- Browsers stabilised
- Many respected web developers pushed for standards and semantics
But HTML isn't rich enough
- HTML's tags aren't good enough to describe the semantics of all kinds of data
- XML can be rich enough, but isn't easily suitable for web frontends
- CSS classes are used to extend the semantics of HTML
That's where microformats come in
Microformats are the HiFi of information on the web
- a way of thinking about data
- design principles for formats
- adapted to current behaviors and usage patterns
- highly correlated with semantic XHTML
- a set of simple open data format standards that many are actively developing and implementing for more/better structured blogging and web microcontent publishing in general.
- An evolutionary revolution
- a new language
- infinitely extensible and open-ended
- an attempt to get everyone to change their behavior and rewrite their tools
- a whole new approach that throws away what already works today
- a panacea for all taxonomies, ontologies, and other such abstractions
- defining the whole world, or even just boiling the ocean
- solve a specific problem
- start as simple as possible
- design for humans first, machines second
- reuse building blocks from widely adopted standards
- modularity / embeddability
- enable and encourage decentralized development, content, services
But how does it help me?
- Enables easy sharing of data from your webpages
- Data is semantically marked up which helps human readers and improves accessibility
- Various tools can do funky things with the data on your page, eg: Firefox toolbars
