The Potential of Microformats

Eric A. Meyer

Complex Spiral Consulting

The Potential Is...

Infinite

The Strength of Microformats

• Microformats are limited in scope by design
• The goal is always to create a simple solution to a narrowly defined problem
• Anyone can create a microformat
• Creation, evolution, adoption, and iteration happen on very short time scales
• Conflict is possible, is not inevitable, can be constructive

Case Study: hReview

• Call for participation put out 23 April 2005
• On 29 April 2005—that's six days—v0.1 was done and published
  • Input and support from representatives of America Online, CommerceNet Labs, Microsoft, Six Apart, Technorati, and Yahoo!
• Defines eleven properties that are relevant to reviewing, well, anything—records, restaurants, concerts, classes, presentations
• Review sites are already expressing interest and adding hReview markup to their content

Some Existing Microformats

• RobotsExclusion (Google’s rel="nofollow" done right)
• XHTML Friends Network (XFN)
  • Metrolling
  • Identity consolidation
• hCard
• hCalendar
• hReview
• Creative Commons license-link annotation

Case Study: Metrolling

1. Publish a list of people you met at WWW2005, with a link to each person's personal site
2. Add rel="met" to each link

   <a href="http://meyerweb.com/" 
      rel="met">Eric Meyer</a>

3. Ping an XFN spider service with your site's URL
4. There is no step 4: you're done!

Identity Consolidation

• Use of XFN's me value can bring pieces of a digital identity together

In Summary

• Microformats are already creating novel solutions
• Semantics are already starting to emerge and spread
  • Extremely low barrier to entry and adoption
  • Based on extremely familiar technologies
  • Immediately understandable when viewing source
• Combining microformats leads to an effectively infinite number of possibilities
  • As more microformats emerge, it will be possible to cross-pollinate and get truly human-centric results

This Afternoon

• 13:30 - 15:00 Microformat Implementations
  • Distributed Social Networks (XFN Implementations) - Eric Meyer, Complex Spiral Consulting
  • People and Events (hCard & hCalendar) - Tantek Çelik, Technorati
  • Reviews (hReview) - Rohit Khare, CommerceNet
• 15:30 - 16:15 Microformats Explorations
  • Bibliographies (hBib) - Rohit Khare, CommerceNet
  • Microformatting SGML - John Allsopp, Western Civilisation
• 16:15 - 17:00 Panel: "Semantic Web and Microformats" (Room 201)