“Algebra was invented long before they had any use for it in physics and computer programming.”

This particular pearl of wisdom was bestowed upon me by my Maths teacher many years ago. It was something that I was perfectly prepared to believe, after all, despite being Welsh, he was a teacher and I had no reason to disbelieve this particular fact. It was not one I chose to re-use. I don’t think it would have made me a hit with the ladies, and I’m fairly certain it would start the sort of conversation I would kill to avoid if I’d heard it mentioned at a dinner party.

However, it was among the first thoughts that stirred unbidden from the depths of my psyche when I finally understood the point of Microformats.

What the whooping funt are Microformats?

Microformats, for the many that have not heard of them (and I don’t blame you) can be, from the point of view of Joe Average User, quite an obscure concept to grasp. If you go to the main website, microformats.org, it will happily explain what they are, but it takes a little more digging to finally find out what they do.

Microformats are not part of a new language. They are a way of using existing tools (XHTML markup) to identify specific types of data, such as people or events.

Take a personal website. It may have at various points around a page all kinds of information pertaining to that person. Their name might be there, their job title, their home town and their phone number might be scattered all over the page. With Microformats, a little bit of code placed at the relevant points around this disparate information, one to highlight the name, one for the job title and so on, means that without there being any visible alteration to the page there is now the capacity to isolate that information, and potentially use it elsewhere.

So?

Okay. So that’s.. nice. I did exactly the same thing. Lovely as it is, where’s the money shot?

Well.

For now, the most obvious usage from a front-end user point of view, (and as far as I have been able to ascertain, the most common) is to isolate contact details. The page with the Microformat embedded on it can be linked to a web application such as X2V that can take those disparate elements of information and bundle it up into a vCard – a downloadable file that will be accepted by most address book applications. As an added benefit, it could be a normal, human-readable passage of text – and doesn’t need to be specially laid out in (say) a table or list.

Not got it yet? Picture this: You create your personal microformat (technical term: ‘hCard‘), embedded around a sentance like:

Hi there, my name is Richard Archer, I live on the Moon and eat cheese for a living. My email address is onthemoon@richarcher.co.uk

..and then with one simple link on your site, people can easily download all your business details into their address book. It’s easy for your customers to download, and it’s even easier for them to get in touch with you in the future, because there are all your contact details smack bang in the middle of their address book!

There is also a plug-in available for Firefox that do a very similar thing, by identifying the presence of a Microformat on a page and giving you the option of saving it locally.

But it doesn’t just stop with person and organisational details (hCard). There are all sorts of standard formats still being developed today – hCalendar for events, hReview for reviews of anything you like, rel-licence for licencing and copyright information, and there are many more out there.

At my day job, we are working on a project to integrate the corporate website with the in-house database. One of the aspects of that will be a page that lists all forthcoming events. I introduced our back-end developer to the idea of Microformats, and showed him how, for example, with the hCalendar format it is possible for people to instantly download event information into their Calendar applications. I have never seen someone completely geek-out to such an extent – he instantly took to it (he’s much smarter than me, you see) and started going on about the potential, what it could do, what it could mean for the company. Now that’s the reaction that it should get!

One of the really nice things for me is the nigh invisibility of it all on the rendered page. For the last six months or so, on the sites of several clients, I have embedded a hCard into their contact details. They don’t really know what the benefit of such activity means to them, but as the information is already publically available, I standardised it for them at a cost of a minute’s extra work. At some point, the killer app that will send Microformats skyrocketing into the atmosphere will be developed, and those tasty little nuggts of information will get their chance to shine. And who’ll get the benefit? My lucky, lucky clients. Bless them!

The idea of Microformats, a little like algebra, is being developed in advance of demand. I’m not normally the laying-down-predictions kind of chap, but in the same way that middle managers all over the world suddenly caught onto the idea of RSS feeds about 5 years after everyone else because Microsoft suddenly started using them, I reckon in about another couple of years or so, the word “Microformats” will be uttered blindly by the unknowing in a bid to sound up to date. A horrible fate for it, but one that all internet technologies must go through, I guess…

Further information

• Microformats.org – everything you could possibly need to know about Microformats, including how to start using them in your sites.
• Suda.co.uk – Brian Suda makes Microformats dance! Well, not dance, exactly. More like, do what they’re told.
• Technorati Microformats search – A Microformats search engine (currently in beta). God Bless Technorati.
• adactio Austin – For me, still one of the best implementations of Microformats in a complete app.