Notes from Microformats Session
Topics to Cover
AUDIO: MF-barcamp_08_26_2006.ogg
Why
Basics
- Read/parse/write microformats
- What kinds of data can be represented?
Developers / Practical Issues
- Events in blog posts, etc.
- HTML is hard to parse
- Why use HTML instead of "XML"
- When not to use microformats
What's New
- What's new in microformats
- Process? Contributions?
- Where is microformats heading? What's the vision?
- Progress on Microformats zen garden?
- Current developments / media types
Session Notes
Why were they created?
- HTML is widely understood
- HTML is universal to read and port
- There's room to build on top of HTML
- Can embed rich, structured data into a web page that's both human & machine readable
- Use accepted solutions (like vCard) to create Microformats that work for the web (hCard)
- It's better to have accurate, visible data than arbitrary invisible data
- BetaThetaPi EDUCamp October 19th 2007
How to Use Microformats
Parsing
- There are many libraries to parse HTML
- Every microformat has a root elements, you can pull classnames out of the root elements. See hCard parsing for example.
- There are some special cases (check for URL in HREF first).
Why use HTML
- Part of the culture of information as things on the web
- Every single piece of content you create has the potential to be shared on the Web
- Ex: chat transcripts wrapped in < pre > because there's no standard chat format (who's saying what, etc.) Using HTML would be an instant way of sharing.
- Ex: iCalendar support via using hCalendar translation to .ics stream -- it's less work to just do it via HTML and Microformats than to do .ics support directly
Markup up Events
When Not to Use Microformats
- When there isn't an established standard, or wide range of existing behavior
- If you're doing something very specific or esoteric
- In those cases, mark up as semantically as you can to build up an existing repository
- By simply using punctuation, using @ signs, etc., you can embed semantics in very short content.
Microformats Zen Garden
- All microformats use the same class names, so:
- If people create stylesheets to make Microformts pretty, they can be reused.
Process
(more notes...)
Barcamp Stanford
Microformats
Tantek Celik
- Microformats = HTML, slightly extended
- Anyone who knows HTML can learn Microformats in under an hour!
Things people want to learn about today:
What's new?
- Events in blogpostings
- Read/parse/write
- What kinds of data can be represented?
- HTML it hard to parse
- Why use HTML instead of "XML"?
- Community process? Contributions?
- So many standards to choose from...
- When NOT to use microformats?
- Picoformats
- Microformats "Zen garden"
- Media/audio/video
- When is it heading? Vision?
- Why were they created?
Example of microformat markup:
<div class="vcard">
<div class="fn">Tantek Celik<div>
<a class="url" href="http://tantek.com">My site</a>
<a class="email" href="mailto:asdf@example.com">My email</a>
</div>