Microformats 2

Stats

• 34% of webdevs use µf
• 1.88 BILLION hCards (acc. Yahoo Searchmonkey)
• 36 Million hCalendar Events (partly thanks to facebook)

First brainstorming, hCard, hCalendar in 2004.

So what are they?

A set of simple, open formats for adding semantic data to HTML (mainly using the class attribute).

What do they look like?

Barnaby Walters

<a href="http://waterpigs.co.uk">Barnaby Walters</a>

<span class="vcard"><a class="fn n url" href="http://waterpigs.co.uk">Barnaby Walters</a></span>

(more than 40 extra characters!)

With microformats-2:

Barnaby Walters

<a href="http://waterpigs.co.uk">Barnaby Walters</a>

<a class="h-card" href="http://waterpigs.co.uk">Barnaby Walters</a>

Only 15 extra characters.

1: Implied Properties

<a class="h-card" href="http://waterpigs.co.uk">Barnaby Walters</a>

• type: h-card
• name: Barnaby Walters
• url: http://waterpigs.co.uk

2: Prefixes

• Benefits authors: sets apart µf2 classnames from styling hooks
• Benefits parsers: gives vocab-independant hints about how to parse the data

<article class="h-entry">
	<h1><a class="p-name u-url" href="http://example.org/post">My Awesome Blog Post</a></h1>
		
	<p>Published <time class="dt-published">2013-01-23 20:54:31</time></p>
		
	<div class="e-content">
		<p>You know another great thing about microformats 2?</p>
		<p>No more bloody double-encoded HTML in RSS feeds!</p>
	</div>
</article>

3: Improved Semantics

Classic microformats often used existing schemas as-is, (e.g. VCARD => hCard, ATOM => hAtom).

• In h-card, the notorious fn and n have been replaced with p-name
• In h-entry, entry-title, entry-summary and entry-content have been replaced with the less redundant p-name, p-summary and e-content.

How to use microformats 2 Today?

Start publishing!

• People (h-card)
• Addresses (h-adr)
• Blog Posts/articles (h-feed containing h-entry)
• Events (h-event)
• Geolocation Data (h-geo)
• Recipes (h-recipe)
• Resumes (h-resume)
• Reviews (h-review)
• Products (h-product)

Links

• Microformats 2 Wiki
• #microformats IRC room on freenode.org
• Barnaby Walters (me) - waterpigs.co.uk, @barnabywalters

Microformats-2 by Barnaby Walters is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.