microformats: a quiet revolution

If you use large sites like Google, Yahoo!, or Microsoft, you’re using microformats. If you use twitter or WordPress, you’re using microformats. So there is a lot of life to the use of microformats. Even past the death of a site that uses microformats: the use of microformats helps that information be archived elsewhere.

Presenters
Tantek Çelik – tantek.com
Karsten Januszewski – Microsoft
Glenn Jones – Madgex
Jeremy Keith – Clearleft Ltd
Date
Saturday, March 14
Sites
microformats wiki
oomph project
huffduffer
madgex: the lab
google social graph API
yahoo query language


huffduffer

huffduffer is an audio bookmarking service that generates rss feeds of your audio bookmarks (i.e., a podcast for you). the site consumes microformats in the following way: when you sign up, you add your website. thanks to microformats, the use of a url on your profile is incredibly powerful. huffduffer passes your url through a google api called social graphing. uses the XFN microformat rel= values. especially “rel=me”, which is useful for pointing out where else you exist on the web.

the goal: give out a minimum amount of information to a site, and the site gets the rest of what it needs from other sites without you having to re-enter that information.

the initial strong connection

xfn rel=”me” on both your personal site and any of your spaces on other sites (i.e., youtube, flickr, etc) creates a strong connection and uses that connection to figure out the rest of your information (e.g., pulling down hcards).

< a rel="me" href="http://flickr.com/photos/username">flickr.com< / a >

oomph

microsoft products under the oomph project (desktop client, javascript file) that help microformats to be easier to create an consume.

microformats and privacy

there is public microformat content, and content protected behind a login. oauth allows you to create links between APIs to allow a user to specify access to particular parts of a protected web api.

holy crap, glenn jones’s social graphing demo is blowing my mind.

value excerption pattern

There are language localization and accessibility problems with microformats. Enter: the draft value excerption pattern.

Sometimes, only a part of an element’s content is used as the value of a microformat property. This may occur when a property has optional sub-properties, such as tel in hCard. Other times, the most logical, semantic element for the property class name may include other content.

For these purposes, the special class name value is used to excerpt out the relevant element content.

These are notes from a session at sxsw interactive. My own take on topics are mixed in with what the presenters were actually saying, so do not assume all of this content is my own.