err.theblog does a wonderful write up as to the power of microformats. While miroformats are seemingly not that big of a deal, its really quite powerful when you think of what they are, which are just formats. The iniate power of any tool comes from its ability to format, or to become meaningful by its very design. Consider an electrical plug and cord. The plug format, I’m sure, was initially designed with wild variations with the only major ability being that it could consume a current. The power of the technology was increased tenfold when a format of plug became omni-present and sockets and plugs had a standardized format in which to accept. Now I can take my plug anywhere, save for europe, and plug it in, safe in the knowledge that I should be getting a charge out of it.
Which brings us to markup. Every developer and their child for the past 20 years has written wildy different markup based off of, at times, ever evolving markup standards“. Microformats are here to clean up our mess and make real meaning of our markup. With meaning comes the ability to supply a wider range of possibilities and power…. which is … wait for it … the very nature of the sematic web! Markup with meaning provides powerful advantages to developers and consumers. What those powers are at the moment might not seem the most profound, but give it time. Let it propigate out into the world. In the meantime, stop your horrific coding practices for styling and marking up your code with your own personal stamp. When it comes to scenerios where a microformat would prove to be a worthwhile cause, such as:
- People and Organizations
- Calendars and Events
- Opinions, Ratings and Reviews
- Social Networks
- Licenses
- Tags, Keywords, Categories
- Lists and Outlines
write code that adopts the microformat. I promise you more meaning will come to your code.