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A microformat is a prescribed way of presenting your data and marking up your content.

This might sound a little strange - why would you want to follow somebody else's rules on creating your code rather than making up your own? The point is to make your content match other people's in the way that it is marked up. Since the end user doesn't see the actual code, this is not a hindrance to your users and you are free to put addiotional code together so that the page suits your own needs. Indeed, there is no requirement for you to mark up your data in this specified way, so why might you want to?

Well, if you do mark it up in the correct manner then it becomes more accessible to machines and to specially written pieces of software that can use it in a sensible way. You might be familiar with something called a vCard - that is a way of marking up contact data so that it can be passed from programmes such as Outlook to mobile phones. It means that things can be more easily imported and worked with.

The idea of microformats on the web has been slow to take off but there are tools available that can read those they come across. The most popular plugins for the Firefox browser are the Operator toolbar, and Tails. A quick web search will lead you to these if you want to investigate them in full. What they can do is notice and handle data on a webpage that is encoded in the right way. So if there is an event microformat on a page listing appointments, Operator will let you (among many other things!) add that event to your calendar with a simple click or two - no cutting and pasting, no re-keying of information!

To read up in full about the concept you should visit http://www.microformats.org where you can find out the full details and implications of coding your web pages in this way, but the requirements can be incredibly simple. For example, you might want to let the Operator script recognise parts of your page as being tags and all that you need to do for that is add

rel="tag"

into your anchor (link) tag!

Microformats don't get in the way of anything and can be applied for common bits of information such as tags, events and contact details. It's probably one of the easiest ways to help your site along into the web 2.0 world, is entirely unobtrusive and extremely simple to implement. Read up and give it a go.

Learn more about this author, Max Lehmann.
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