Joshuaink: First impressions of Microformats

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First impressions of Microformats

Tuesday June 28, 2005

My initial impression of microformats from logging on to the site was that this was some major new technology, so technical is the blog and wiki. I was a little surprised then to learn it was "just" XHTML after all. First on my microformats wish list then, get someone on the blog that can communicate with us lower level geeks!

Again, so technical is the blog it's hard to see any real world use for microformats but then I noticed Andy Hume had implemented hCards on his blog and he explains it better than I could but it is indeed a very simple but powerful idea and certainly worth keeping an eye on. There are also some useful "tools" listed under the "code" section of the micorformats site to let you have a play with the idea.

So yeah, first impressions, very interesting idea but if we, the unwashed designers, are to implement and spread the word, we may need some help cutting through the tech speak and finding our way to the heart of the matter.

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Levi

1137 days ago

Hrmm, well I “get it” but the site seems very vague on what it’s actually for, and what it’s all about, maybe it’s just me but it seems very “I don’t get it”. I don’t think it’s as much the technical language but more no clear indication of the sites purpose. Meh.
Matt Wilcox

1137 days ago

I have to agree, I’ve not understood the fuss because I’ve not… well, understood ‘it’.

“Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.”
– well OK, so what does that tell me? That Microformats are supposed to be simple to use and understand? Doesn’t tell me what they are though, or why I’d need one, or what the benefits of having them are.
If you read the whole ‘about microformats’ page, it still doesn’t tell you why you would use them, or what they’re actually for. The site tells me lots about Microformats, without ever seeming to explain the point.
Jaro

1137 days ago

I’ve got a similiar problem, I’m not really sure if I get the whole idea of microformats. I just need to read the whole site through yet but some clearer indication would be helpful. Or maybe I’m just dumb …
Rob Waring

1137 days ago

I think I understand them from managing to find an example of an hCard on the site but it did involve a lot of hunting around. From what I’ve seen so far its just a bunch of and hooked together. I’m not sure what I’d use it for though, other than cataloguing stuff.
Andy Hume

1137 days ago

With Eric Meyer speaking along these kind of lines…

“All I know is that I feel the same way about microformats as I felt about CSS, back when I first encountered it.”

(http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2005/06/21/microformatsorg/)

... then there must be plenty to be excited about.

Thanks for the link John :)
Jim

1137 days ago

As far as I can tell, microformats can be summed up as: “include information in your web pages in a specific way so that the information can be pulled out by scripts”.

It’s a very useful technique, but it doesn’t sell very well, so they are trumping it up with lots of marketing gobbledegook to try and get people on board. Unfortunately, that’s antithetical to your wish for somebody to speak plainly. If they spoke plainly, people might just say “is that all?” and lose interest.

“AJAX” is just a dumb buzzword, but it got people talking about remote scripting. Perhaps the microformats buzzword will do the same thing.
Tom

1137 days ago

I’d like one for photo’s, EXIF and XMP are far too complicated way to add metadata to a photo.
Nate

1137 days ago

I think part of the problem is that we don’t yet have (or at least I haven’t seen) an example of a script that shows how microformatted content could be leveraged. At SXSW, Eric and Tantek mentioned the idea of translator scripts. For example hcard is based off of vcard.. so one could scour the web or a sub-set of sites and easily produce a series of vcard files by translating the hcard format back into vcard format.
But under what scenario would that be helpful? A few examples were given at the time, but I think this is an idea that has more of a promising future, than a provable present.
I’d venture to guess that the motivation is something along these lines:
* There’s stuff we put on the web regularly and often, such as contact info for example.
* There are thousands of ways to mark-up this content that are all completely valid according to xhtml spec.
* Why don’t we pre-agree on a method, and by doing so, allow this data to be leveraged later in powerful (but undetermined) ways.
Andy Hume

1137 days ago

@Nate:

“so one could scour the web or a sub-set of sites and easily produce a series of vcard files by translating the hcard format back into vcard format.”

This is exactly what X2V does do. Check out the blog post that John linked to. Run that page through X2V and you will be presented with a vcard download for each person that has commented on the blog.

At the moment this just means Name and URL but it is more a proof of concept than anything.

I don’t understand this ‘it’s not supported yet’ argument. What’s to support? It’s just common old XHTML with some extra semantic markup. Not supported? Try CSS, Javascript, or any other technology that sits alongside XHTML.

It is ‘supported’, but only a few people are taking the time to write implementations to take advantage of it.
mearso

1136 days ago

The simplest thing that I could find on the site for a simple minded designer like me was the XFN scheme for tagging people in one’s social network.

How useful it might be is pretty unclear at the moment, but the good thing is that it’s easy to give it a try.
Matt Robin

1136 days ago

John: I think you might have hit the nail on the head already in your comments (above):

I was a little surprised then to learn it was “just” XHTML after all.

......#I’m looking around me as if to say, ‘Hey, has anyone else but you and me realised this?’ #

Seriously – I think ‘Microformats’ is getting hyped-up by some people trying to make it more ‘techy’ than it actually is and claiming that ‘variations’ of xhtml/xml are somehow ‘NEW’ formats all of their own….hmm, I’m rather cynical of this. I’m not disputing the great qualities of the Microformats and there is obvioulsy a lot of potential for their uptake to increase…but…this is nothing as profound as the arrival of CSS3, the phenomenon of Blogging, or even the possible spec of xhtml 2+. Nice as they are – Microformats are giving me the impression of the Web’s idea of ‘Post It’ notes…not really ground-breaking is it?

Andy: I’ve just arrived at this Blog from Eric’s and read that exact article…and then I looked at the Microformats site…and I’m not seeing the greatness there (nice site in it’s own rights – oh yes). I think Eric is perhaps getting too excited about something because it’s ‘NEW’ and because the xhtml is already familiar too him on a sub-concious level…so he feels an attachment to it (err, so to speak).
Andy Hume

1136 days ago

“and I’m not seeing the greatness there”

I think you hit the nail on the head. ;) No one is hyping this beyond what it is. The sexy Simple Bits site has probably hyped it up more than anything – it’ll no doubt be listed on such prestigious URLs as cssvault.com and stylegala.com, and we’ll have even more designers who aren’t really ‘getting it’.

Still not to worry. Perhaps this isn’t for the mainstream yet. As you say, they’re still young, and the specs are pretty unrefined still.

“just XHTML after all.”

Ain’t that the beauty of the things?
Matt Robin

1136 days ago

Andy: Ah yes – beauty indeed! :)
Matt Wilcox

1136 days ago

Would I be correct in thinking:

“Microformats are an agreed method of marking up your HTML so that search engines and other utilities can better understand the content”

?

Because if that’s the case would someone please say that up-front . It makes sense in one scentence, rather than needing to dig through examples and a long list of what Microformats are and are not before you actually understand the point of them. Assuming the above is what Microformats are about. I’m still not sure.
Chris

1136 days ago

My biggest issue isn’t the technicality. I can get into that and bang on it till I figure it out. But, from the main site, I really don’t know if this is something I should be using now? Or is this something for down the line? Or what the heck is going on?

I’m sure in time it will work itself out. I haven’t been to the site since launch day but it’s on my list of things to investigate further so I understand it. It, at first, seems a simple enough idea. I just don’t feel like Tantek is talking to me.

But, there is an IRC channel so I’ll be sure to bug him there.
Ben Ward

1136 days ago

I will, in a quiet voice, put my hand up and say that ‘I do get it’, but I will concede that at first I didn’t. You can’t tell from the name what a Microformat really is.

The site and the information are techy, yes. But the formats and the specifications are still in development (bar XFN, which has been in the wild for a little while now). It’s a bit frustrating that it’s hyped up to appeal to everyone so early, but I think that will come with time.

If I were to try and give a real-world definition it would go a little something like this:

“Microformats are a way of adding more information to XHTML”

For the time being, that’s where I’d leave it. It’ll get easier when formats like hCard and hCalendar are declared finished and examples can be built around them because it’ll be much easier to teach from an example than from a raw concept.

As for usage, I reckon the first real user exposure will be Firefox extensions, potentially getting included in the core Firefox user interface if the devs can be suitably convinced of the usefulness. Consider:
* Visit a web page with an author’s embedded hCard (contained within an [address] block, naturally). A ‘contact’ icon appears in the status bar and clicking the icon gives you the option to ‘email the page author’ and ‘add the page author to your address book’.
* Now take hCalendar, a potentially more universally useful format. Sites like Upcoming.org would no-longer need you to manually enter events information through their website, all you have to do is mark-up a blog post with hCalendar class names and Upcoming could instead glean this information from your RSS feed. Also, you could again have browser-side integration with things like the Firefox calendar extension.

There’re also formats for mark-up up reviews – providing the means for a centralised spider to collect all the ratings of a particular film from the entire Internet into one summary.

We’re in a state right now where the potential outweighs the usefulness. Until the blogging tools have native support for such things, they wont get used en mass. Of course, until they are used by a suitable number of people then the idea of Upcoming.org changing to only find events present in RSS feeds is a tad far fetched.

I think people screaming ‘search engines’ are being a tad misleading. Everyone’s default response to ‘search engine’ is Google. Google wont do jack with Microformats until such a time as they upgrade their software to recognise them. Now, I think they should (of course), but it wont be soon. When MF advocates talk search engines, they mostly mean Technorati. Doing new, cool stuff with Technorati is no bad thing of course, but you’ll appreciate that it’s not the same thing as ‘search engine’ implies.

When I redesign I’m going to use them. I hope that they will catch on.
Matt Wilcox

1136 days ago

Ben, you’ve shone a light on the whole idea of Microformats for me! The idea of a Firefox extension that utilises Microformats… I’m now seeing the possibilities. Going to a site and being able to see a list of XFN information, grouped like a IM client might ‘friends’, ‘family’, ‘met’ etc… Integration into a browser is the perfect use for such information – I’ve never seen the point of a search engine based on XFN, but a plug-in is a great idea.

OK, now I’m getting mildly excited.
Jo

1136 days ago

hah! i was thinking the very same thing over the weekend. While microformats has a very nice design, clarity is not one of its strongpoints.
And i got stuck with the same idea: “euhm isn’t this just xhtml, just more of it”

Ben you made it a little clearer, just don’t know if i fully get it though.
Roan

1136 days ago

It’s funny, I used to use this exact example when teaching XML to people:

“Imagine it’s the year 2525, and we’re all permanently jacked into the net via Firefox v 250.04. Navigating to a site, using only your brain, you come across the contact page. With the slightest twitch of a neuron the contact details for the site owner are loaded into your outlook neural net”

Bad sci-fi fiction aside, it highlights the importance of meaningful data.

It seems as though the reality won’t be so far away, but instead of XML it’ll be using good old fashioned XHTML.

I think it’s going to be cool.
AkaXakA

1136 days ago

I have to agree with Jim, it’s feeling more like a buzzword, but it could indeed have actual real world use afterall…

However, I do completely fail to see how something like an hcard would go mainstream? I just see endless spam opertunities…

XFN is kinda interesting, but doesn’t really add anything real and usefull to a weblog post discussion.

People need to realise though that ‘real world use’ and ‘wow that’s cool’ don’t amount to a mainstream push. As long as it isn’t bothsome and has clear added value people will go and use it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for web inovation, but I haven’t seen it yet here.

I’ll have to agree with Mat: seeing CSS3 implemented will be far more of a revolution for the web – if they don’t screw it up like css2 that is.
Ben Ward

1135 days ago

Matt Wilcox, for a really crude (if anything, accidental) example of XFN integration with Firefox grab the Link Toolbar (http://cdn.mozdev.org/linkToolbar/). The ‘more links’ button (folder icon on the far right) will show a hierarchy of XFN links by the rel attribute value.

It’s not useful or intuitive (it’s a bug, really, since XFN support wasn’t part of the link toolbar plan), but it shows it can be done!

joshuaink

First impressions of Microformats

Levi

Matt Wilcox

Jaro

Rob Waring

Andy Hume

Jim

Tom

Nate

Andy Hume

mearso

Matt Robin

Andy Hume

Matt Robin

Matt Wilcox

Chris

Ben Ward

Matt Wilcox

Jo

Roan

AkaXakA

Ben Ward

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