sergiosantos.info

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Microformats inside

12.May.2007

Now this blog comes with microformats. For those who aren’t familiar with them, they are simply a set of standards to follow when writing specific portions of XHTML, like contact information, events announcements, people relationships and several other aspects. Design for people first and machines second, they optimize the information that gets published on the web enabling a better parsing of it and therefore more relevant results.

The Microformats Wiki is the place where the community discusses the formats with several specifications already released and also several drafts being created for further formats. There you can also find very long lists of places/websites where they are already used. Even a book as been published on the subject and two cheat sheets have been wrote.

On this website I’ve placed two hCards with my personal information. One little in the bottom of every page with basic information: website and email and other on the About page more detailed, even with geographical location. All the book reviews I wrote until now and future ones will use hReview, a format that is already used in some portals like Pingerati to gather and archive reviews of products. I’ve been using rel-license for a time now for the CreativeCommons license. And finally a minor details that could help the indexation, on the tag list below the blog posts and on the global one that can be found on the bottom of the website all the links have the rel-tag attribute. From now on I will also try to express my relationship with other web folks with XFN to start building my social network through blog links.

There are already some nice extensions for some browsers that could help you benefit right away from microformats on the web like Operator for Firefox, Flocktails and Tails Export for Flock. I specially like the exporting features and google maps integration that can be found on Operator. It really helps you to imagine all the possibilities Microformats gives us.

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