Microformats and CSE

[MikeGale]

I'm aware of chatter about microformats.

My take on the situation is that simple syntax where an attribute is used may take off but more complex structures involving a nested heirarchy of tags will gain less traction.

One thing that means is that the values of class, rel and rev, attributes are going to acquire meanings (than they didn't have previously).

I haven't worked out what that means for CSE but presumably there is some impact.

What does this mean for CSE in your opinion?

[MikeGale]

I entered a last choice "Using them in a big way" in the survey.

How do I edit the options, to get that back in?

(I have no idea why it has disappeared.)

[Albert Wiersch]

I entered a last choice "Using them in a big way" in the survey.

How do I edit the options, to get that back in?

(I have no idea why it has disappeared.)

Hi Mike,

I added it for you. I would think you could edit the original post that you included a poll in and add the option. That's what I did.

I haven't heard much about microformats. No one has mentioned it to me before and I don't recall coming across it.

[MikeGale]

Thanks for that Albert.

I'm no expert on RDF and haven't used it yet. There are areas where this sort of thing would be very useful to me, though the designs I see don't really hack it (yet).

Examples (I've replaced angle brackets with ( and ) in the following, the CMS system kills the markup!):

Attaching a tag to a link
(a href="http://technorati.com/tag/tech" rel="tag")tech(/a)
so you've got a form of tagging within a page. (Some other people are developing a similar idea to mark up e-mail. Seems popular in some quarters, may endure.)

Attaching license details to a link
(a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/" rel="license")cc by 2.0(/a)
There has been a need for something like this for a long time. Niche market.

Embedding your address details in a page is called "hCard ". I wouldn't do that myself too many spammers.

XFN or XHTML Friends Network. When I first saw this I thought it looked nuts. Now I'm not sure.

For more information try:
http://microformats.org/
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microformats

While the RDF approach might be technically better I'm unconvinced that we'll see it anytime soon. There's something in RDF called RDFa, which I haven't researched.

In technical fields there's huge potential, also pricing on web pages. This could be where it really takes off. Hidden to most but vital to some. I'm sure there's write ups in that area, but I've never seen one.

[Albert Wiersch]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the links.

As for CSE HTML Validator, I suppose it means that if anything becomes popular and can be programmatically checked, then it would make sense to implement it.

Doesn't look like much is happening now though. The example on Wikipedia uses "class" so it looks very similar to what someone would do using CSS. I suppose the standards that need to emerge are exactly what microformats to use. If there was a standard, then it should be possible to have CSE HTML Validator check for it, at least to some degree.

[MikeGale]

That indicates that (in this forum at least) microformats are not in use. There's a fair amount of talk about them from people who would like to invent the future, and they seem to be creeping into various areas so we might see more. In the short term I'd guess that some small/closed groups are using them, almost in secret.