Microformats
There is an interesting article at SimpleBits about their use of Microformats for a new site they have created called Cork’d. I am thinking that this would be a good thing to try for this weblog’s soon to be released commenting system. I think that I may like the use of semantically rich markup. It provides the possibilty for greater functionality (like searching and organizing) without really doing any more work. There is already a Firefox extension, Tails, for organizing Microformated data.
Semantically Rich Markup simply means that the markup is meaningful, not just the data, but the markup itself! Here is an example of non-semantic markup
<span>Some Data</span>
<abbr>Some other data</abbr>
An example of semantically rich markup would be:
<span class=”name”>Some Data</span>
<abbr class=”Address”>Some other data</abbr>
The differences are minor, but it adds meaning to the scheme without needing to populate any of the data. Where microformats come in to play is that they provide a standardized way to add meaning to your data.
