Weekend Project: Harvest Microformats for Fun and Profit

” Microformats are a way to slip computer-readable information
into HTML, so it’s “semantically” marked-up, not just visually
marked up. With hCalendar, for example, when you advertise a big
event on your Web page, it’s not only human-readable, but the
browser can notice that it’s a calendar event and prompt the reader
to add it to his or her Sunbird or Google Calendar schedule. The
tricky part is, most browsers don’t highlight microformats at all,
much less prompt you to do something interesting with them. This
weekend, you can enable that power in Firefox and start making
better use of the microformats that are hidden, all around you, on
the Web.

“Such semantic Web markup is one of those great-sounding ideas
that is just a little too hard to explain to the average
non-tech-obsessed person on the street. There are a couple of
reasons why. First, it combines multiple existing “formats,” which
can make it hard to keep the pieces straight. In a nutshell,
microformats are a way to wrap invisible HTML or XHTML elements and
attributes around text in a page, so that it conforms to some other
data format. For example, the hCard microformat squeezes the
existing vCard contact format into plain HTML by putting div
elements around a person’s name, email address, and whatnot.”

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