“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.