Yesterday's promise of the semantic web remains largely unfulfilled -- machines still aren't very good at understanding the code they're rendering. Thankfully, microformats are changing that.
Microformats are tiny pieces of code which add contextual meaning to HTML tags. They give browsers and other web software tools easy signposts to help understand what data is being read and rendered. First and foremost, microformats were designed to be simple for humans to read and write. If you know HTML, you can add microformats to your web pages.
Specific pieces of web content like dates, addresses, product reviews and resumes can be tagged with simple microformat codes. Whenever an author places an event listing on a web page, he can append it with the appropriate piece of code. If the browser supports microformats, it reads that tagged piece of data as: "this is an event the user can put on his calendar." For every phone number or street address, a microformat can tell the browser, "this is somebody's contact information."
Microformats are standardized and open, making it easy for software developers to build tools to gather this instantly accessible information.
Tantek Çelik, CTO of Technorati and creator of microformats, describes their purpose as a way of "making web pages both more useful and more usable to the average person."
The most basic example used to illustrate the power of microformats is the hCard format. An hCard accomplishes the same thing as a vCard -- click on an hCard on somebody's web page and you can add that person to your address book in an instant.
The hCard format is probably the most widespread of all microformats. The standard is already in use on contact and profile pages around the web. Heck, even Steve Martin has one. Yes, that Steve Martin.
Another excellent example of the way microformats can make your life easier is the hCalendar format. The popular social networking site Facebook is one of many sites that encode calendar events in hCalendar format.
Click on an event and it gets added to your hCalendar-compatible calendaring application. Most calendars on the web and the desktop, including those from Google, Yahoo, Apple and Microsoft, have support for these microformats.
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And it's not just people who benefit -- search engines can use microformats to provide better results.
"By marking up contacts with hCard, events with hCalendar, reviews with hReview, listings with hListing," says Çelik, "search engines will be -- and are -- able to find that information on those sites better."
For search engines, microformats eliminate the "guess factor." They can tell search engines and other web services exactly what data they are looking at, says Çelik.
For example, the search tools supplied by Google, Yahoo and Creative Commons that search for CC-licensed content can parse rel-license, the microformat for license links.
If you're curious about exploring microformats on your own, the best way to jump in is by installing a couple of Firefox add-ons. Michael Kaply's Operator and Robert de Bruin's Tails Export both make it easy to take advantage of the tiny tags.
Operator auto-detects various microformats in a page. It can auto-add contact information to your address book or send event schedules to your web-based or desktop calendar service. Tails Export has many of the same features, and it can even send calendar or contact data directly to your mobile phone via Bluetooth.
Firefox 3 will support microformats in some form when it arrives later this year. Mozilla's Firefox development team hasn't yet decided precisely what form the support will take.
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