Microformats: More Meaning from Your Markup

Who's Using hCard and hCalendar?

There are several organizations that have begun to encode their data using microformats: some you might have heard of, others you probably haven't.

Yahoo! is a big supporter of microformats, incorporating them into many of its properties. These include Yahoo!'s photo-sharing site Flickr, its events site Upcoming, and its tech and local sites.

Flickr, as shown in Figure 1, uses microformats to mark up the user profile pages with hCard. It's now possible to extract the user profile directly into your address book from a Flickr profile page. If you use the Operator plugin for Firefox, you'll see that you can export the contact details to a variety of different address book clients, both locally and on the Web.

Upcoming, depicted in Figure 2, uses the hCalendar microformat to mark up events. This makes using Upcoming so much easier, because even as you browse an event page you can import it directly into your calendaring application.

The Yahoo! tech and local sites use the hCard microformat to mark up local companies. Now, when you search for a pizza place on Yahoo! local, it returns all results with hCards so that you can extract the telephone numbers for easy dialing.

One of the more surprising supporters of microformats has been the Cambodian Yellow Pages. This company marked up its entire phone directory with hCards -- instantly creating millions of instances of semantic data on the web -- just by editing one template in its content management tool.

Just to have a peek at the potential of microformats for portable social networks, let's consider Dopplr. Currently in private beta, this an online service for frequent travellers. One day, when it's released, you'll be able to create a new account and import a list of your friends by submitting a URL that has content marked up with the hCard microformat. Dopplr will parse the page, extract the people, and search its database to find your friends. Dopplr also can import hCalendar data. If you plan to travel to an event, you can submit a URL with hCalendar data; Dopplr will parse it and block out those dates on your travel schedule, so your friends can keep up to date on your whereabouts.

Even recently, Microsoft has jumped on board with a brief tutorial about how to mark up the contacts in SharePoint with hCards.

What Does the Future Hold for Microformats?

The future looks bright for microformats! That much is made evident by the manner in which major organizations, such as Yahoo!, have perceived the potential of microformats and implemented them in a variety of ways. Likewise, browser vendors have expressed interest in adding functionality directly into the browser to detect and act on semantic markup.

Imagine that the browser on your mobile phone or PDA automatically detects multiple hCards on a page. It adds a menu item to call the numbers or, if configured accordingly, it imports them directly into your address book. If there's a postal address, the browser automatically pulls up Google Maps, and shows the location on a map.

All this free movement of data doesn't stop with contacts, however -- the same applies to events and other structured data. If the browser finds hCalendar data, it can import the calendar information into the local calendar application, set reminders, and find the event location on a map. The best part about all this is that microformats are invisible to the end user. The average person doesn't have to understand microformats or even know they are in use. Essentially, microformats facilitate this functionality for free.

RSS readers are very popular these days. Wouldn't it make sense to build similar functionality into an address book? Right now, the only way I can keep my address book up to date is by constantly copying data from friends' emails and web sites into it. It's a boring, repetitive, time-consuming task. With an RSS pull-style address book, on the other hand, my friends could simply publish their data online with microformats and the address book application would poll their web sites, searching for any updates. My friends and contacts wouldn't need to spam their entire address book so as to alert everyone to the changes; they need simply update their HTML, and the next time this new address book application checks the site, it'd automatically update the local entry to reflect the changes. I'd "subscribe" to my contacts' web page for address book updates. Many calendar applications already do this with event data, so why not with people too?

These are only a few simple examples of what could be possible if publishers encoded more semantic information into their HTML. And again, in all of the above examples, the end user doesn't need to know or care that their data uses microformats -- just that it works.

The microformats community is strong and vibrant. It's very open, too, so anyone can help make it a better place by adding examples, implementations, and documentation to the Microformats Wiki. Of course, the most obvious way you can contribute is by adding microformats to your own web sites and advocating their use. With microformats, you can transform your web site content from plain text to meaningful packets of information that can be remixed and consumed in ways you may never have thought of!