Microformats - I don't get it
Firing up Bloglines tonight, I was greeted by the news (via Simplebits) that a new website had been launched to tell the world about Microformats.
Fantastic, I thought – some of the top designers, bloggers and other people-in-the-know have been dropping hints about the sheer genius and Web 2.0-ness of microformats for some time now, so I had high hopes that here was a turning point in the life of the web.
Click.
Hmmm.
I’ve got to be brutally honest – I don’t really see what all the excitement was about.
Basically microformats are a prescribed way to mark-up certain types of content. For example, here is what my business card might look like according to the hCard microformat:
<div class="vcard"> <a class="url fn" href="www.thewatchmakerproject.com">Matthew Pennell</a> <div class="org">29digital Design Studio</div> <div class="adr"> <div class="street-address">123 My Street</div> <span class="locality">My Town</span>, <span class="region">My County</span> <span class="postal-code">PE3 9YL</span> </div> <div class="tel">01234 567890</div> </div>
The idea being that by specifying the id and class names used across all sites for particular items, the web benefits due to the predictability of mark-up. Or something. It’s also linked somehow to Technorati’s attempt to tag the entire web. Eventually the whole internet will become one big inter-connected tag cloud.
But that code sure doesn’t look nice, does it?!
Seriously, who’s going to choose to implement all that extraneous cruft when they are wedded to the idea of lean, stripped-down semantic XHTML? We’ve been taught to cherish each kilobyte, and sold CSS on the promise of smaller filesizes and faster page load – and now we’re supposed to embrace rampant classitis in the name of progress?
I don’t think so.
What did you expect?
Ah, well that would be telling. Suffice to say that I thought microformats would be an excellent new advance in CSS-based design. It isn’t what I thought it was; which means that there may be a gap in the market – watch this space.
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Comments
- paul haine
- 1171 days ago
- “But that code sure doesn’t look nice, does it?!”
I had the same thought when I first looked into microformats. I like the concept of predictable, standard ways of structuring data, but I don’t like the over-reliance upon meaningless divs and spans, particularly when tags like ‘address’ exist and aren’t used. - #2
- Richard Conyard
- 1170 days ago
- The trouble is they are striving for browser backwards compatibility which then kind of ruins the point.
Importing additional namespaces from w3c and re-writing the code more like:
<vcard> <name>..</name> <org>..</org> ... </vcard>
Would make much more sense, but most browsers wouldn’t be able to follow it. - #3
- Richard Conyard
- 1166 days ago
- This is probably a very stupid question.
Does anyone know of the implications / ramifications of potential microformat adoption in commercial authoring tools. I looked on the site for licence terms, but couldn’t find them. - #6
- Matthew Pennell
- 1166 days ago
- Richard: No idea, but isn’t the point of microformats that they use existing technology/specifications? So I can’t see how there would need to be any kind of licensing to use them…
- #7
- Richard Conyard
- 1165 days ago
- Hmmm, cool. I’m looking to upgrade some of the forms features in my CMS. If that is the case then I know where to look for a few of the bits and bats.
BTW. Nice new look! - #8
But all that ID carp would be better as xml tags.