Jeremy has a nice post on how you can intermix microformats, rather than creating new ones or extending existing ones. For example, rather than adding a “date of death” field to hCard, why not mark something up as both an hCard and an hCalendar event — the hCard comtains all the person details, and the event (the person’s life) has a start an end date. No need for a “date of death” field. Jeremy’s got other smart examples, too.
Because I sometimes I get asked about my feelings on microformats (people have noticed that I don’t ever really talk about them), here they are:
Microformats are a very good idea, and they can do no harm. They’re just regular, semantic HTML, so implementing them is easy and non-controversial in my mind. However, I don’t feel like they currently add much value, because there are so few useful tools for consuming them. Yes, I know there are Firefox extensions and such — but where are the microformat tools that are going to benefit my Mom or my Grandma? Also, I sometimes wonder why one wouldn’t simply add a read-only REST API to their site, instead of encoding everything in microformats. It seems simpler and less fragile to me.
So, bottom line: I haven’t gotten into microformats much myself. Not because I don’t think they’re a good idea. In theory, they are. But more because I haven’t seen a lot of real-world benefit to taking the time — yet. The flip side is that the time I would have to take is pretty minimal, and implementing them on my sites could do no harm (even if I don’t think it would do much good, either).
001 // Adam Spooner // 07.02.2007 // 12:17 AM
I think NNW has done an excellent job of picking up on Microformats and making them useful. In fact, if it weren’t for the spacebar issue, I’d use NNW as my default browser … since all I mainly do is read feeds.
But you’re absolutely right. They are useless to the general web-browsing population. My wife would have no idea what an hCard or hCalendar is. Up until recently she didn’t know what a feed was, and she still doesn’t subscribe with them even though she knows what they are now.
I think it will take time and better browser recognition before the general public uses Microformats to their full potential.
002 // Jeff Croft // 07.02.2007 // 12:28 AM
I agree, NNW’s implementation is nice (and I also use it as my main browser most of the time). BTW, the spacebar issue is fixed in the latest betas.
But, until they become part of Safari or IE (that is, default browsers on major operating systems), I don’t see a whole lot of value. And, I’m not totally convinced that day will ever come — but I’ll be happy if it does! :)