Transcript An Opportunity

Microformats and hAtom
David P. Janes
Founder, BlogMatrix
Microformats at 10,000 feet
 existing XHTML presentation
 PLUS “class” and “rel” attributes
added to express semantics
Microformats close up
 augment existing presentation with
semantic data
 the (lower case) semantic web realized
in XHTML
 built on what people are doing, not
what we think they should be doing
 built from existing standards and
composited from other microformats
Microformats are not…
 a new language or data format
 a panacea, an open ended solution,
the answer to all questions
 a new approach to the web
 scraping
Microformats are




incremental
simple
humans first, machine second…
… but well-defined
An example. This…
<a href="http://tantek.com/">
Tantek Çelik
</a>
Technorati
… becomes this …
<div class="vcard">
<a class="url fn"
href="http://tantek.com/">
Tantek Çelik
</a>
<div class="org">Technorati</div>
</div>
… and means this …
BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:3.0
N:Çelik;Tantek
FN:Tantek Çelik
URL:http://tantek.com
ORG:Technorati
END:VCARD
Example Microformats







hCalendar
hCard
RelNoFollow
RelTag
XFN
XOXO
… and hAtom
The Microformat Process
 thoroughly document examples from the
web
 identify:




common semantic elements from examples
analogies to existing standards
the potential to reuse existing microformats
and reuse (or properly use) HTML elements
 design…
Microformats Design Patterns
 class
 rel
 abbr
 datetime
Why Microformats (and not
something else)?
 easy to produce
 tweaking existing templates
 same database
 … still work needed on tools …
 easy to consume
 javascript
 Greasemonkey
 and from any language
hAtom
 systematically identifies microcontent
 weblogs
 newspages
 many uses
 better searches
 reblogging
 printing…
 easy to generate
 just template work
What does it look like?
<div class="feed">
<div class="entry">
<h3>...</h3>
<div class="content">...</div>
<address>...</div>
<abbr class="published" title="20051125T184500Z">..
</abbr>
</div>
</div>