WSG Meetup: Microformats

Posted Monday 23rd October, 2006

Last Thursday I took a trip up to London, to attend the latest meeting of the London Web Standards Group. It took place at the New Cavendish Street campus of Westminster University and the theme of the evening was microformats. The speakers were Mark “Norm” Norman Francis, Jeremy Keith, and Drew McLellan.

The meeting kicked off with Norm, who briefly introduced microformats and then spent some time going over their history. Jeremy then took up the reigns by introducing the various current microformats, both elemental and compound. Drew then finished up the evening by talking about the future of microformats and how, if properly implemented, they can potentially be used to replace a specifically written API (in some instances).

I took some photos of the evening but, unfortunately, they turned out badly - so I binned them. Faruk AteÅŸ, however, turned up with his usual expensive camera and a huge lens to boot. With this in mind, I’d recommend looking at Faruk’s photos of the evening, on Flickr.

Here are my notes on the evening:

What are microformats?

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.

Visible Meta-data

XML Namespaces?

All markup should be semantic. Semantic describes what the content is, not what the content looks like.

Elemental Microformats

rel

rev

Compound Microformats

Most compound microformats are class based.

Tools

Development

Discovery

Extraction

Included in: Development, Microformats, Web, Web Standards, XHTML

Categories:

  1. Accessibility
  2. Ajax
  3. Apache
  4. API
  5. Architecture
  6. Books
  7. Browsers
  8. CMS
  9. CouchDB
  10. CSS
  11. Design
  12. Development
  13. Django
  14. Email
  15. Events
  16. Gaming
  17. Grammar
  18. Hardware
  19. HTML
  20. HTTP
  21. Humour
  22. Idea
  23. Information Architecture
  24. JavaScript
  25. jQuery
  26. Life
  27. Linux
  28. Literature
  29. Mac OS X
  30. Meme
  31. Microformats
  32. Monday
  33. MySQL
  34. Networking
  35. News
  36. Personal
  37. Photoshop
  38. PHP
  39. Python
  40. Reference
  41. REST
  42. Science
  43. SEO
  44. Server
  45. Site
  46. Sitepimp
  47. Social
  48. Spelling
  49. Syndication
  50. Testing
  51. The Future
  52. Thoughts
  53. Tools
  54. Tutorials
  55. Typography
  56. UI
  57. UNIX
  58. Virtualisation
  59. Web
  60. Web Standards
  61. Widgets
  62. Wii
  63. Writing
  64. Xbox
  65. XHTML