Thoughts on web development and technologies by Peter Gasston
Immediate uses for Microformats
One of the hardest things about Microformats is explaining their benefits to people. You can say “It’s a standardised format of marking-up content, which is both human and machine readable!” until you’re blue in the face, but until you can show people a practical benefit they usually remain unmoved.
Luckily there are a few tools out there which will help you show off the benefits of using Microformats, and involve little work from you.
King amongst tools, of course, is Operator, an add-on for Firefox which finds data in pages and presents you with options to transform them using a series of web-based tools. If the person you’re trying to convince doesn’t use Firefox and/or have Operator installed, however, there are a few good tools available online to show their potential.
hAtom is a microformat used for marking up blog posts or other serialised content. Using the Optimus tool you can turn any page marked up with hAtom into an RSS feed, by adding a link on your page in the following format:
http://microformatique.com/optimus/ ?uri=http://www.example.com/&format=RSS
Optimus will return correctly formatted XML for users to subscribe to. It’s also a decent validator for other Microformats (although actually seems to struggle a little with hAtom in that department).
hCard is the standard for marking up contact details, and there is a tool from Brian Suda which will convert them into vCards for you; Technorati also have a test implementation of this tool available, which I’ll link to as they no doubt have better servers. To extract vCards from a page which has hCard markup, simply create a link in this format:
http://feeds.technorati.com/contacts/http://www.example.com/
You can then either save the generated vCard, or add it directly to your address book.
Also from Brian Suda / Technorati comes the hCalendar tool, which transforms your data into the iCalendar standard. Again, you just link to your marked-up page using a specially formatted URL, although this time you get two choices;
http://feeds.technorati.com/events/http://www.example.com/
… returns a single .ics file with each of your events to add to a calendar; while:
webcal://feeds.technorati.com/events/http://www.example.com/
… produces a webcal feed which is updated regularly, allowing subscription to your events.
Implement these tools on your web pages and you’ll have a suite of neat features you can impress your visitors and peers with. It’s a real advantage of using Microformats.
Sylvain galineau [June 24th, 2008, 6:07 am; Permalink]
IE8 leverages hatom for its ‘web slices’ feature…
kl [July 20th, 2008, 4:53 pm; Permalink]
hCard Validator is another implementation hopefully making authoring of hcards easier.