Microformats, yes they are that easy

Let me be the first to admit that new technologies are at many times daunting for me. I don’t consider myself a programmer. I tend to hack at existing code and somehow string it together with duct tape. I thought microformats would be the same kind of undertaking. But it’s not. To begin, what are microformats? Well you can find a few definitions here . On the microformats.org homepage it says

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.

Even that is too complicated of a definition, for those of you who do standards based code (as we all should be) are more or less already doing it. You wrap ’s and ’s around data.

It took me awhile to wrap my head around how easy it was. I marked up my college’s directory in microformats in an hour one afternoon. After I was done I was sitting there asking, “Is that really it?”So onto the sell, how does this relate to higher ed? Many of the microformats standards relate to things we do daily.

• hCard
  Do you have a directory listings on your site? Oh you do, me too.
• hCalendar
  Do you have events / cal on your site? I thought so.
• rel-license
  Are there people who need to license their works?
• hResume
  Are there resumes on your site?
• course-catalog (still in development)
  Do you list courses?

Others include citation, collections, directions, grouping, job listing, measurements, and meeting minutes.

I’m sure everyone would be hard pressed not to find a few of these on his or her site.

At microformats.org there is a site / wiki where you can find detailed info on all the specs. There are also creators to help you in the process. The creators are also open to new microformats and provide info on how to contribute on something that may not have been thought of yet. Still don’t get it? Here is a presentation called “What are microformats?” by Tantek Çelik one of the people behind Microformats.

Next question, how do you work with microformats? There is a plugin for Firefox (please tell me you use Firefox) called Operator . Operator leverages microformats that are already available on many web pages to provide new ways to interact with web services. You can export contact info, add google calendar events, find locations on google maps all just because things are marked up in microfomats. If you download and install the plugin and then go to my site there are microformats embedded and you can export my contact info. to your addressbook. So I leave you with:

The microformats principles

• solve a specific problem
• start as simple as possible
• design for human’s first, machines second
• reuse building blocks from widely adopted standards
• modularity / embeddability
• enable and encourage decentralized development, content, services

P.S. my first post “Mobile Web for Higher Ed ” was the 3rd of July so I thought I would mention it in case it got lost in the shuffle.

- Matt Herzberger -July Blogger

3 comments July 9th, 2007