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Monday

The Growth and Evolution of Microformats

Monday, 12 March 2007 @ 1400

Frances Berriman, Volume
Michael Kaply, IBM (backnetwork) (kaply.com/weblog/)
Glenn Jones, Creative Dir, Madgex
Tantek Çelik, Chief Technologist, Technorati

Microformats started at SXSW 2003 with xfn (the rel tag).
Site (http://microformats.org/) launched in 2005.

Event sites have benefited greatly from microformats.
Stanford has marked up everything with hcard and hcal.

Firefox plug-in: Operator – exploits any found microformats on any page and connects them to upcoming.org, Google Calendar or Maps, etc. (This is so friggin’ cool!). Check out the debugging mode to peer into the DOM.

backnetwork

Tantek is folding his t-shirts during the presentation.

Microformats do not have working groups like the W3C. The concern that this would lead to too many microformats has not happened. The process (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microformats) keeps this from happening.

Microformats evolve in the real world of the web – describing real data rather than being prescribed.

xmdp

kitchen.technorati.com

www.edgeio.com – hosting/aggregator for hlistings

hcard crawler – alexa

Who is Jeremy Keith (guest panelist) (he later helped pay for free drinks for gobs of SXSWites at the Lava Lounge as part of the Boffins).

Research:

  • htail to bluetooth
  • microformats used to enhance accessibility
  • hcard and openID

Drew Mclellan  has created a DW plugin to support microformats.

Microformats could be thought of as low-level, read-only APIs.

Hiding your address from spammers:  checkout Mike’s Musings and see how it is parsed on his page?