Microformats

I’ve been reading up on Microformats, especially hCard and hCalendar, which are XHTML equivalents of the vCard and iCalendar standards, respectively. Michael McCracken explains the usefulness of Microformats like this:

With Microformats, you can send & publish things like events, business cards, and product reviews as meaningful XHTML that a person can read in a browser, but a program can import, index and remix as native data.

A pretty neat concept. Microformats utilize predefined class names to identify the contents of XHTML tags as data fields. For example, within an hCard, class=”fn” means that the contents of the tag (could be an h1, div, p, span, or any other tag) is the full name of the person described in the hCard. In the near future, I’ll blog about some great uses for various Microformats and, hopefully, show some examples within sites I’ve developed.