Features: Article

All FreePint Articles | Article Categories |

Microformats: Digging Deeper into the Web [ABSTRACT]
Wednesday, 1st December 2010 Please login to be able to star items

By Ben Ward

Abstract:

Extracting, repurposing and combining information is a core activity for info pros so it's good to know that we are being helped with this on the Web, even if we are not aware of it. Ben Ward describes how microformats - vocabularies which enable recurring information to be described and then reused - are making content available in a richer form and facilitating the combining of data.

Article:

What's Inside:

Microformats were invented to make it possible for recurring content like news updates, contact details and event information to be reused; consumed in simple, common ways and understandable between different applications. Microformats are primarily vocabularies plus a small handful of parsing patterns for developers so are easy to implement. The most significant implementation so far came when Google implemented an enhancement to Google Search called Rich Snippets resulting in search result listings now being enhanced using page content marked up with microformats.

----

This is a brief abstract of the full article. FUMSI subscribers can log in to MyShop at FreePint view the full article. Others can subscribe to FUMSI now for access to the complete archive of FUMSI articles.

By Ben Ward

Ben Ward is a British web developer based in San Francisco, and an active member and contributor to the microformats community since 2007. He has documented publishing patterns from across the Web, contributed to various specifications as an editor and author, and worked on mark-up patterns for accessible publishing. By day he works as a software engineer at Twitter, and also writes sporadically about the Web on his blog at benward.me. You can reach him through his domain, or follow @benward on Twitter.