Microformats
Apr 14th, 2006 by Karen
I keep hearing more and more about microformats of late and I’m been doing a little research and reading to try to understand a bit more about them. I first encountered them a while back when I was looking for web-based presentations solutions. At that point I discovered XOXO which stands for stands for eXtensible Open XHTML Outlines. This microformat can be used in combination with a stylesheet to build web-based presentations. There is also some talk about using XOXO to replace OPML which is an XML format for outlines that is often used to share a list of feeds (RSS, Atom) to which a person is subscribed. Microformats also include things like hCalendar (a standard way to encode calendar information for distribution), hCard(a standard way to encode contact information format for people, companies, and organizations), and XFN (simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks). There are also things like rel-license which allow you to link licensing information. You can see an example of this if you view the source code of this blog and look for the of code that says
<a rel="license" xhref="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/" mce_href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/" ><img
alt="Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License" border="0" xsrc="http://creativecommons.org/images/public/somerights20.png" mce_src="http://creativecommons.org/images/public/somerights20.png" /></a>
Still my knowledge in this area is severely lacking still. I need to do a bit more reading and would love to see some more tangible examples of how microformats can be used, particularly in library settings. Thanks to Darlene Fichter I also discovered a podcast on microformats that I want to listen to to learn more. Hopefully I can develop a more robust understanding of this technology over time and discover some interesting ways to leverage this.
