Microformatpalooza

Tantek Çelik has a whole gaggle of microformat links over on his site:

• hCard Creator
• hCalendar Creator
• hReview Creator
• hFolk 0.4

Basically, microformats are just organically grown rules to add application-specific semantics to existing XHTML documents. This is mostly accomplished by adding class attributes to your existing markup, and occassionally by adding additional markup (span & div) to indicate a hierarchical data structure. This description leaves a lot to be desired, but an example is worth a thousand explanations…

In the first restaurant review of the hReview example linked above, notice how some fairly normal HTML is enhanced by adding the hReview classes. By adhering to this standardized format, specialized web crawlers could take note of it, and aggregate the information into an uber review search engine.

That’s the incentive for people to use these types of microformats. Imagine if a Googlebot (or Technorati, or whoever) saw an hReview compliant review of a new movie on your site. It could correlate your review with reviews by other authors about the same movie. It could then present average scores, excerpts of reviews, links to the reviews, and other interesting statistics.

Maybe in my Copious Free Time, I can convert some of those hThingie Creators into WordPress plugins, and maybe even come up with some microformat proposals of my own.

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