Microformats speed access to web data

When geeks get together, as at the d.Construct web developer conference in Brighton earlier this month, the conversation often turns to microformats. “It’s a way of turning the entire web into one giant API,” enthused Jeremy Keith from design consultancy Clearleft.

Microformats are not high on the agenda outside geek circles, but perhaps they should be. A semantic web has been talked about for years, but with little to show for it. The web today is still mostly a jumble of content marked up for presentation rather than meaning. The beauty of microformats is that their simplicity and limited aims makes them more likely to be implemented than grand schemes for adding metadata to web sites.

A microformat is a specification for using HTML attributes to define common object types. There are only a small number that are much used, including hCard for contacts, hCalendar for events, and hReview for reviews. Since microformats are pure HTML or XHTML mark-up, they do not require any server-side technology.

The big deal about microformats is that they make data meaningful to machines as well as humans. This means that the encoded content can be properly indexed and aggregated. For example, if events on your web site are marked up with hCalendar, a web crawling application can detect the pages with event information, and a search site could display them in a neat tabular form showing start and end date, location, and subject. There is also potential for extending web browsers to recognise microformats and do useful things like single-click import of event data into calendaring applications.

Microformats may be a revolutionary technology. Today, if you want to view classified advertisements you go to eBay, and if you want user product reviews you go to Amazon. Now imagine that microformats for classified advertisements and product reviews were in wide use. Syndication sites could present classified listings or product reviews drawn from the entire web. Better still, they could combine the two, so you would get user reviews of items on offer. Mash this together with geographic coding, and you can filter the listing to show items near you. All of this makes it easier for smaller web sites to compete with the big boys.

It would be great to see support for microformats built into web authoring tools such as Adobe’s Dreamweaver, as well as in server-side platforms such as ASP.Net. Microformats make the content of a web site more discoverable. Considering all the energy put into other forms of search engine optimisation, it would be foolish to overlook them.