Microformats and me

Having attended the greatly motivational @media conference last week, I’ve come away feeling more enthusiastic about the up and coming microformats movement.

Last year, during @media 2006, I was introduced to the concept for the first time. In its simplest form, it’s a way of wrapping web content within a set of standardised class names. The idea being that if everyone uses these class names, it makes it very simple for other systems to parse and pluck out the data. The example given was marking up personal details as an hCard which could then be linked to the Technorati contact generator. The generator will parse the page and offer you a vCard file for download, which you can then import into Outlook or some other address book software.

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