Microformats here and now
From the translator: Below is my translation of an extensive article by John Allsop, in which the author talks about the state of microformats as of the end of the summer of 2006. Particularly noteworthy are examples of the use of microformatted content in modern web applications. Recommended for reading to all who are interested in microformats.
The Big Picture on Microformats
')
Posted by: 08/28/2006 by John Allsopp
Translation: 1.12.2006 Maxim Rossomahin
Many of the readers of magazines like Digital Web are already familiar with the term microformats, or even managed to play with hCards and tags. In fact, if you mentally return to November 2005, you can say that Digital Web was one of the first journals that touched on this topic - then a great introductory article was published, written by Garrett Dimon.
The potential of microformats causes some controversy, but the fate of any technology, regardless of what they promise, is based on the results of their implementation. So, what happened to microformats in a year or so since they appeared on the scene? As soon as microformats are just markup, their impact strength is less noticeable than, say, AJAX - whose dynamic effects are usually akin to pushy advertising. It may come as a surprise if I say that the degree of introduction of microformats by software makers, publishers, and aggregators is quite significant, and you may visit websites literally stuffed with microformatted content every day, without even knowing it. In this article, I will talk about how people use microformats right now, and towards the end I will heat up your appetite with a couple of tempting microformats projects.
Chicken and Egg
At times, I admire those who bought the very first fax — a damn bold move. The fax illustrates an important phenomenon associated with many technologies - the network effect - the case when the value of technology increases the more it is used more often. Trying to overcome the pole of instability of the network effect, new technologies inevitably face the problem of "chicken or egg?". In the case of microformats, content producers may ask: “If there are no services capable of successfully working with microformats, then why should we implement these microformats?”. Service developers can ask a similar question: “If there is no microformatted information, then what the hell should I develop services in the hope that such information will ever appear?”. Below, I will show that microformats have already overcome this problem in several areas of their application.
If you are a content producer, software developer, or web services developer, then using semantic markup of your microformat-based content provides certain benefits. Let's look at those people, open-source projects, major league content producers (such as Yahoo!), and service developers (Technorati), who are already working with microformats.
Development
Most of us rely on tools to do all the hard work for us — which is why we use WordPress or Moveable Type for publishing on blogs, or Dreamweaver for design. Despite the fact that it is relatively easy to write microformat code manually, many of the applications that we use for layout, web design, and publishing are already able to easily and easily add microformatted content to documents created with their help. Directly or using plugins.
The WASP working group involved in implementing web standards in Dreamweaver (“The Web Standards Project Dreamweaver Task Force”) has developed a plugin for Dreamweaver that allows you to easily add microformatted content to your web pages. The beta version of the plug-in helps Dreamweaver users embed hCard, rel-tag, hCalendar, rel-license, and XFN data into the documents they create.
WordPress, Moveable Type, Drupal, TextPattern and other content management systems provide plug-ins that can add various microformatted content to blogs and websites created using these systems. Having a simple search, it is easy to find plug-ins for the implementation of virtually any type of microformats (reviews, calendar, tags, contact information and much more) that can work as part of content management systems and blog engines.
In addition, Microformats.org has several special online applications that allow you to create microformatted content. hCard Creator , hCalendar Creator , and hReview Creator will help you create a complex of microformats - just fill out the form with the necessary information, and then copy the resulting code into your source code.
So, whatever your favorite development methods are, you will probably find tools to help you perform boring, routine work - such as, for example, translating user-friendly, human-readable forms for recording dates and times in ISO 8601 format , making it easy to create microformatted content. .
Publication
The initial phase of the introduction of microformats - about a year ago - showed the dominance of microcontent created by the blogging community. Good examples of this are tagged with the rel-tag and XFN microformats, and, to a lesser extent, contact information marked with the hCard microformat. In the past 6 months or so, the active use of microformats has been seen, for example, the widespread use of microformats in Yahoo!
Several sites owned by Yahoo !, among them Tech , Local , Flickr , and Upcoming , use various microformats in their publications. And Yahoo! Tech, and Yahoo! Local uses the hReview microformat in its reviews (reviews), while Yahoo! Local also uses hCalendar to describe events, and hCard to describe contact information. Flickr uses hCard in user profiles, as does the XFN microformat. Upcoming.org contains over a million event listings worldwide, marked up using hCalendar.
Many of these services are good because while users create content — for example, reviews or reviews — they don’t need to know anything about the storage formats of this content. The service tools themselves do all the work of translating content into the appropriate microformat.
All this is a significant step by content publishers, providing the Web with a significant increase in microformatted content.
We uncork microformats
Recently, a website has been opened that boasts one of the most innovative ways to use microformats that have taken place in the past 12 months - the magnificent Cork'd - a wine Web 2.0 site. Its creators, well-known web developers Dan Cederholm (Dan Cederholm, SimpleBits ,) and Dan Benjamin (Dan Benjamin, Hivelogic ), used hReview as a format for wine reviews, hCard - as a format for reviewer profiles (anyone can register on the website and give a rating of wine), and a rel-tag for tasting tags (the reviewers can evaluate wines by bouquet — pepper, berry, etc.). Cork'd is a great example of simple, elegant use of semantic markup based on the use of microformats. If you have already started working with microformats, or are still planning to use them, then it will be damn foolish not to take the time to learn how Cork'd uses microformats.
Aggregators
The use of microformats promises to decentralize development, content, and services . To this day, the largest reviewing sites (for example, book reviews on Amazon, or movie reviews on IMDB), classifier sites, social services, and other types of sites are all centralized: they keep users and their content within the same service. , less often - they provide an API through which third-party developers can create interesting tricks with content. Think of classifiers such as craigslist or Trading Post, or of online auctions like eBay, of all these protected greenhouses, in which user-created content is carefully monitored and, in many cases, is the property of aggregator sites.
The recent boom of cartographic “mashups” (mashups) has revealed the possibilities that open data provides if free access to greenhouses is allowed. However, open data requires standardized presentation formats, such as microformats, otherwise they are useless.
In fact, search by tag, existing on the Technorati site, demonstrates the power of a simple standard format for tagged content - in 15 months the number of tagged posts indexed by Technorati has grown from zero to 100 million.
But what happens to other decentralized services using microformats?
Technorati recently introduced Kitchen , a search service specializing in searching in microformatted content, including events in hCalendar format, contact information in hCard format, and reviews in hReview format — information is being collected all over the world. Now you can search in microformatted content, regardless of where it was published.
However, there is one more thing: Pingerati . Pingerati sends information about microformatted content to services that want to index it. Sites like Eventful can query Pingerati to get an updated index of events tagged according to the hCalendar format. This solution greatly facilitates the development of distributed services for microformatted content, providing publishers with a centralized place to request updates, as well as mechanisms for indexing content updates, in much the same way as weblogs.com allows blogs to notify them about new content.
This type of distributed services has not yet received the distribution that microformatted content already has, but several promising services can already be identified. One of those can be considered Edgeio - a site that collects and then classifies descriptions of goods in the hListing format, instead of forcing you to send them to him. Edgeio also publishes descriptions in this format, and, realizing that not everyone has the opportunity to publish classifications on its own website, it provides its capabilities for publication. And the recently opened Kritx website presents an aggregator that collects reviews in hReview format - the mechanism of operation is similar to that used by the Edgeio website.
Nothing will pass in time, as aggregators and distributed services appear for microfichered reviews of restaurants, films, events, resumes, and other types of content. In addition, microformatted content is becoming more and more common, whether on blogs, on sites like Cork'd, and on large projects like Upcoming (and other affiliated sites on Yahoo!). It is possible that soon it will appear on your site, if you have not had time to do it until now.
Cool stuff
Recently, I was fortunate enough to listen to Lars Rasmussen, one of the developers of Google Maps , who talked about creating maps. An interesting part of the story was that the developers could not even think about what people would do with “mash-ups”. Well, now “mash-ups” for many have become part of the ordinary. In fact, Rasmussen said that they had to organize access to the API through a license key in order to keep track of popular “mash-ups”. The open approach practiced by Google to providing access to cartographic data to third-party services essentially created a new category of web applications, creating the prerequisites for the formation of a multitude of more solid cartographic applications. By providing simple, well-established formats for web-based data, we are approaching one more step towards the generation of unprecedented mash-ups.
hCard and map mash-ups
Using the example of a couple of interesting projects, we will show how to correctly use new ways of working with data. One of the most active supporters of microformats over the past two years has been Brian Ciuda (Brian Suda). Brian is a co-author of hCard and hCalendar specifications, a brainstorming participant in the development of other formats, the author of a book on microformats published by O'Reilly, and the developer of X2V . X2V is an online service that takes a page containing, say, hCard or hCalendar content, and converts it into vCard or iCalendar format (IETF formats that served as the basis for the above-mentioned microformats), and then, depending on the settings of your operating system, they automatically sent to an application that can use these formats (Outlook, iCal, Address Book, etc.).
Following the link , you can see how it works - X2V extracts the hCard embedded in the Web Directions website, converts it to vCard, and allows you to download and upload the resulting file to your address book.
Recently, Brian created another interesting tool for creating mash-ups based on Google Maps and content in hCards format containing geographic information. The example defines the location for the hCard content of the http://suda.co.uk/publications/EuroOSCON06/ page containing the geographical data — the longitude and latitude of the venue of the event. The geographic data is then converted into the Google Maps data format (XML-based KML format), and sent to Google Maps, which then displays the place and its name. This mash-up does not need the Google API, and it clearly shows one of the options for what people can do with microformatted data.
What are you waiting for?
The network effect tells us that the value of technology increases the more it is used more often. Microformats are rapidly following this rule. Innovative publishers publish microformatted content, while innovator developers see microformats as a means to help develop new types of online services. All these innovators, passionately taking on the case, are already able to show the real value of microformats, and what they are capable of.
And even if you still doubt the use of microformats in web development, why not try installing the Tails extension in your Firefox, or FlockTails extension in the Flock browser? You can see that the sites you visit are already using hCard, hCalendar, or hReview. After installing the extension, try reading the descriptions of wines on the Cork'd website, or visit one of the Yahoo! Tech websites. As soon as the browser receives a page containing microformatted content, the microformats logo will appear at the bottom of the browser window. Click on the logo - get detailed information about the microformatted content of the page.
Whether you are a web developer, a content creator, or a web service developer, you’ll be in a good company if you take into account the benefits that microformats promise your content, web application or web service. Looking for a fresh idea for a new service? Why not make an aggregator of reviews on restaurants, movies, books, etc. - like an Edgeio model? I would love to join the ranks of your experts.
Microformats have come of age. So what are you waiting for ?
Additional Information
The Big Picture on Microformats
')
Posted by: 08/28/2006 by John Allsopp
Translation: 1.12.2006 Maxim Rossomahin
Many of the readers of magazines like Digital Web are already familiar with the term microformats, or even managed to play with hCards and tags. In fact, if you mentally return to November 2005, you can say that Digital Web was one of the first journals that touched on this topic - then a great introductory article was published, written by Garrett Dimon.
The potential of microformats causes some controversy, but the fate of any technology, regardless of what they promise, is based on the results of their implementation. So, what happened to microformats in a year or so since they appeared on the scene? As soon as microformats are just markup, their impact strength is less noticeable than, say, AJAX - whose dynamic effects are usually akin to pushy advertising. It may come as a surprise if I say that the degree of introduction of microformats by software makers, publishers, and aggregators is quite significant, and you may visit websites literally stuffed with microformatted content every day, without even knowing it. In this article, I will talk about how people use microformats right now, and towards the end I will heat up your appetite with a couple of tempting microformats projects.
Chicken and Egg
At times, I admire those who bought the very first fax — a damn bold move. The fax illustrates an important phenomenon associated with many technologies - the network effect - the case when the value of technology increases the more it is used more often. Trying to overcome the pole of instability of the network effect, new technologies inevitably face the problem of "chicken or egg?". In the case of microformats, content producers may ask: “If there are no services capable of successfully working with microformats, then why should we implement these microformats?”. Service developers can ask a similar question: “If there is no microformatted information, then what the hell should I develop services in the hope that such information will ever appear?”. Below, I will show that microformats have already overcome this problem in several areas of their application.
If you are a content producer, software developer, or web services developer, then using semantic markup of your microformat-based content provides certain benefits. Let's look at those people, open-source projects, major league content producers (such as Yahoo!), and service developers (Technorati), who are already working with microformats.
Development
Most of us rely on tools to do all the hard work for us — which is why we use WordPress or Moveable Type for publishing on blogs, or Dreamweaver for design. Despite the fact that it is relatively easy to write microformat code manually, many of the applications that we use for layout, web design, and publishing are already able to easily and easily add microformatted content to documents created with their help. Directly or using plugins.
The WASP working group involved in implementing web standards in Dreamweaver (“The Web Standards Project Dreamweaver Task Force”) has developed a plugin for Dreamweaver that allows you to easily add microformatted content to your web pages. The beta version of the plug-in helps Dreamweaver users embed hCard, rel-tag, hCalendar, rel-license, and XFN data into the documents they create.
WordPress, Moveable Type, Drupal, TextPattern and other content management systems provide plug-ins that can add various microformatted content to blogs and websites created using these systems. Having a simple search, it is easy to find plug-ins for the implementation of virtually any type of microformats (reviews, calendar, tags, contact information and much more) that can work as part of content management systems and blog engines.
In addition, Microformats.org has several special online applications that allow you to create microformatted content. hCard Creator , hCalendar Creator , and hReview Creator will help you create a complex of microformats - just fill out the form with the necessary information, and then copy the resulting code into your source code.
So, whatever your favorite development methods are, you will probably find tools to help you perform boring, routine work - such as, for example, translating user-friendly, human-readable forms for recording dates and times in ISO 8601 format , making it easy to create microformatted content. .
Publication
The initial phase of the introduction of microformats - about a year ago - showed the dominance of microcontent created by the blogging community. Good examples of this are tagged with the rel-tag and XFN microformats, and, to a lesser extent, contact information marked with the hCard microformat. In the past 6 months or so, the active use of microformats has been seen, for example, the widespread use of microformats in Yahoo!
Several sites owned by Yahoo !, among them Tech , Local , Flickr , and Upcoming , use various microformats in their publications. And Yahoo! Tech, and Yahoo! Local uses the hReview microformat in its reviews (reviews), while Yahoo! Local also uses hCalendar to describe events, and hCard to describe contact information. Flickr uses hCard in user profiles, as does the XFN microformat. Upcoming.org contains over a million event listings worldwide, marked up using hCalendar.
Many of these services are good because while users create content — for example, reviews or reviews — they don’t need to know anything about the storage formats of this content. The service tools themselves do all the work of translating content into the appropriate microformat.
All this is a significant step by content publishers, providing the Web with a significant increase in microformatted content.
We uncork microformats
Recently, a website has been opened that boasts one of the most innovative ways to use microformats that have taken place in the past 12 months - the magnificent Cork'd - a wine Web 2.0 site. Its creators, well-known web developers Dan Cederholm (Dan Cederholm, SimpleBits ,) and Dan Benjamin (Dan Benjamin, Hivelogic ), used hReview as a format for wine reviews, hCard - as a format for reviewer profiles (anyone can register on the website and give a rating of wine), and a rel-tag for tasting tags (the reviewers can evaluate wines by bouquet — pepper, berry, etc.). Cork'd is a great example of simple, elegant use of semantic markup based on the use of microformats. If you have already started working with microformats, or are still planning to use them, then it will be damn foolish not to take the time to learn how Cork'd uses microformats.
Aggregators
The use of microformats promises to decentralize development, content, and services . To this day, the largest reviewing sites (for example, book reviews on Amazon, or movie reviews on IMDB), classifier sites, social services, and other types of sites are all centralized: they keep users and their content within the same service. , less often - they provide an API through which third-party developers can create interesting tricks with content. Think of classifiers such as craigslist or Trading Post, or of online auctions like eBay, of all these protected greenhouses, in which user-created content is carefully monitored and, in many cases, is the property of aggregator sites.
The recent boom of cartographic “mashups” (mashups) has revealed the possibilities that open data provides if free access to greenhouses is allowed. However, open data requires standardized presentation formats, such as microformats, otherwise they are useless.
In fact, search by tag, existing on the Technorati site, demonstrates the power of a simple standard format for tagged content - in 15 months the number of tagged posts indexed by Technorati has grown from zero to 100 million.
But what happens to other decentralized services using microformats?
Technorati recently introduced Kitchen , a search service specializing in searching in microformatted content, including events in hCalendar format, contact information in hCard format, and reviews in hReview format — information is being collected all over the world. Now you can search in microformatted content, regardless of where it was published.
However, there is one more thing: Pingerati . Pingerati sends information about microformatted content to services that want to index it. Sites like Eventful can query Pingerati to get an updated index of events tagged according to the hCalendar format. This solution greatly facilitates the development of distributed services for microformatted content, providing publishers with a centralized place to request updates, as well as mechanisms for indexing content updates, in much the same way as weblogs.com allows blogs to notify them about new content.
This type of distributed services has not yet received the distribution that microformatted content already has, but several promising services can already be identified. One of those can be considered Edgeio - a site that collects and then classifies descriptions of goods in the hListing format, instead of forcing you to send them to him. Edgeio also publishes descriptions in this format, and, realizing that not everyone has the opportunity to publish classifications on its own website, it provides its capabilities for publication. And the recently opened Kritx website presents an aggregator that collects reviews in hReview format - the mechanism of operation is similar to that used by the Edgeio website.
Nothing will pass in time, as aggregators and distributed services appear for microfichered reviews of restaurants, films, events, resumes, and other types of content. In addition, microformatted content is becoming more and more common, whether on blogs, on sites like Cork'd, and on large projects like Upcoming (and other affiliated sites on Yahoo!). It is possible that soon it will appear on your site, if you have not had time to do it until now.
Cool stuff
Recently, I was fortunate enough to listen to Lars Rasmussen, one of the developers of Google Maps , who talked about creating maps. An interesting part of the story was that the developers could not even think about what people would do with “mash-ups”. Well, now “mash-ups” for many have become part of the ordinary. In fact, Rasmussen said that they had to organize access to the API through a license key in order to keep track of popular “mash-ups”. The open approach practiced by Google to providing access to cartographic data to third-party services essentially created a new category of web applications, creating the prerequisites for the formation of a multitude of more solid cartographic applications. By providing simple, well-established formats for web-based data, we are approaching one more step towards the generation of unprecedented mash-ups.
hCard and map mash-ups
Using the example of a couple of interesting projects, we will show how to correctly use new ways of working with data. One of the most active supporters of microformats over the past two years has been Brian Ciuda (Brian Suda). Brian is a co-author of hCard and hCalendar specifications, a brainstorming participant in the development of other formats, the author of a book on microformats published by O'Reilly, and the developer of X2V . X2V is an online service that takes a page containing, say, hCard or hCalendar content, and converts it into vCard or iCalendar format (IETF formats that served as the basis for the above-mentioned microformats), and then, depending on the settings of your operating system, they automatically sent to an application that can use these formats (Outlook, iCal, Address Book, etc.).
Following the link , you can see how it works - X2V extracts the hCard embedded in the Web Directions website, converts it to vCard, and allows you to download and upload the resulting file to your address book.
Recently, Brian created another interesting tool for creating mash-ups based on Google Maps and content in hCards format containing geographic information. The example defines the location for the hCard content of the http://suda.co.uk/publications/EuroOSCON06/ page containing the geographical data — the longitude and latitude of the venue of the event. The geographic data is then converted into the Google Maps data format (XML-based KML format), and sent to Google Maps, which then displays the place and its name. This mash-up does not need the Google API, and it clearly shows one of the options for what people can do with microformatted data.
What are you waiting for?
The network effect tells us that the value of technology increases the more it is used more often. Microformats are rapidly following this rule. Innovative publishers publish microformatted content, while innovator developers see microformats as a means to help develop new types of online services. All these innovators, passionately taking on the case, are already able to show the real value of microformats, and what they are capable of.
And even if you still doubt the use of microformats in web development, why not try installing the Tails extension in your Firefox, or FlockTails extension in the Flock browser? You can see that the sites you visit are already using hCard, hCalendar, or hReview. After installing the extension, try reading the descriptions of wines on the Cork'd website, or visit one of the Yahoo! Tech websites. As soon as the browser receives a page containing microformatted content, the microformats logo will appear at the bottom of the browser window. Click on the logo - get detailed information about the microformatted content of the page.
Whether you are a web developer, a content creator, or a web service developer, you’ll be in a good company if you take into account the benefits that microformats promise your content, web application or web service. Looking for a fresh idea for a new service? Why not make an aggregator of reviews on restaurants, movies, books, etc. - like an Edgeio model? I would love to join the ranks of your experts.
Microformats have come of age. So what are you waiting for ?
Additional Information
- Microformats.org - the lair of microformats
- Unofficial blog
- Introducing the microformats of Brian Sjuda, O'Reilly ShortCuts series
- Microformat Cheat Sheet by Brian Sjuda
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/778/
All Articles