Mar 22

Written by: James Burke
Saturday, March 22, 2008

Wikipedia definition:

A microformat (sometimes abbreviated μF or uF) is a web-based^[1] data formatting approach that seeks to re-use existing content as metadata, using only XHTML and HTML classes^[2] and attributes.^[3] This approach is intended to allow information intended for end-users (such as contact information, geographic coordinates, calendar events, and the like) to also be automatically processed by software.

Current microformats allow the encoding and extraction of events, contact information, social relationships and so on. More are being developed. Version 3 of the Firefox browser,^[5] as well as version 8 of Internet Explorer^[6] are expected to include native support for microformats.

Shown below are some video clips introducing Microformats:

Microformats in action with Google Maps and the Operator plugin for Firefox