An excellent workshop primarily because it was a demonstration of
pragmatic solutions. I've been just slightly involved with some
of the microformat work and I've been looking for resources to help
build mindshare at AOL. The microformats.org web site announced here is exactly what I need. And now I see that Tantek has put his excellent introduction up there. Go look!
What I like about microformats: Start simple and focused.
Evolve rapidly. Borrow like crazy. Keep things human
readable. Decentralize completely. Get real world
experience. Microformats like tags, hCalendar, and hReview are simple enough (and built on
infrastructure that's solid enough) to let the community build
interoperable services.
Best part for users: Microformats are based on XHTML. Which
means they're human readable HTML as far as users are concerned.
No weird XML gobbledygook, no strange attachments, no extra files to
cart around.
Specifics: hCalendar is great because it's just vCalendar mapped
to XHTML. There was a great demo of a service which turns an
hCalendar link into an vCalendar data stream automatically; I'm now
subscribed to Tantek's calendar
through this service. hReview is based on what people are publishing on
the web today, just adding some markup so machines can see the
semantics.
Tools are starting to pop up. There's a Greasemonkey script for
doing hCalendar in any text box. Movable Type is adding support
for writing hReviews. Next step will be
services like Technorati and Google paying attention to the semantics.
Next topic was tags, the uber-microformat (or nanoformat). It'll
have to wait for the next post, though. Need to get some sleep.
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