The microformats movement was officially launched with the unveiling of the Microformats.org website one year ago at Supernova 2005. At that time, Knowledge@Wharton spoke with Tantek Çelik, one of the founders of Microformats.org, about his vision for a more flexible worldwide web with content that can be easily interpreted, collected, and repurposed for other applications.
Microformats are simple extensions to the standard HTML tags used to create web pages. By including the additional microformat markup, web pages go from merely presenting the visual display of content to embodying its meaning. When a traditional web page contains information about an event, for example, the HTML markup conveys little more than the formatting of the text describing the event. But the addition of microformatting can unambiguously identify the date, start time, end time, and venue for the event. With microformat extensions added to the HTML tags, software can add the event to a personal datebook, aggregate content from different web pages into a comprehensive calendar, or let people "mash up" the content in new ways such as adding events to online maps or other web pages.
The microformat movement has been gathering steam since launching one year ago. In this year's Supernova 2006 workshop on "Decentralizing Data," Çelik stated that the number of microformatted entities on the web has increased from a few thousand a year ago to tens of millions today.
At that same workshop, Yahoo! Inc.'s Andy Baio, announced that Yahoo Local is supporting microformats "in a big way," with all business listings, search results, reviews, and events marked up with microformats. According to Baio, Yahoo is now the biggest supporter of microformats on the web. Acknowledging the tendency of Internet companies to constantly outdo each other, Baio wondered aloud whether this would be the first round in a forthcoming "arms race" to microformat the web.
[continue]
Page 1 of 9
> >>