asony999's dashboard

Try the first section of http://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wik... (declaration of interest: I wrote that)

Very good reply.

Thanks Thor.

The idea with Microformats is that HTML can be used for more than just formatting text and images on a Web page--it can be used to actually describe the type of information inside it so that programs can understand it and reuse it in other applications.

Let's say there is a list of names and contact information on a Web page. Perhaps it's a speaker list for an upcoming conference. Many Web developers would just format the content as a generic list like this:

<ul>
<li> Name </li>
<li> Company Name </li>
<li> Email Address </li>
<il> Phone Number </li>
</ul>

The problem with this is that the inherent structure of that information is completely lost. If I want to pull those contacts out and put them in my address book I have to do it manually.

By contrast, Microformats builds on something that Web designers are already doing--namely, adding class names to their html. These class names can be used to describe the structure of the information itself. So the previous example would look like this with the hCard microformat:

<ul id="vcard" class="hcard">
<li class="fn"> Name </li>
<li class="org"> Company Name </li>
<li class="email"> Email Address </li>
<il class="tel"> Phone Number </ii>
</ul>

With the addition of some simple class names we've made it so that a human or a machine can understand the type of data expressed in the html. This makes it relatively easy to write a script or browser plugin that imprts these hcards right into your address book.

The best thing about Microformats is that they build on the behavior that web developers are already exhibiting rather than getting them to adopt a heavy top-down ontological framework.