The Major Revolution in Microformats

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could take the reviews and ratings of a product from one site and automatically plug it into your blog? Or if you could add contact details from a site straight into your Contacts? Or if adding the details of an event from a website to your Calendar didn’t rely on your having Outlook? Or how about creating one resume that all the job sites can read?

This is the promise of microformats and its hReview, hCard, hCalendar and hResume specifications. The microformats wiki defines microformats as “small bits of HTML that represent things like people, events, tags, etc in web pages”.  The idea is that the concept of the data is embedded with it so that a browser can use it in smarter ways. The benefit is that certain types of data are created in a consistently clean and easily scrapable way to simplify the distribution, sharing, reuse and remixing of the data.

Hundreds of sites are using these open standards specifications already, from classic car events aggregators and Golf Digest to Eventful and Ma.gnolia.

The wiki sums it up succinctly:  “Microformats are simple conventions for embedding semantics in HTML to enable decentralized development.” This is a significant step towards the semantic web and more relevant, useful experiences for digital consumers. It’s a way to stop reinventing the wheel and deliver on better web utility.