I recently ran across a wonderful video on YouTube in which Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Wold Wide Web,speaks about the idea of the Semantic Web. It’s a simple, yet elegant concept that has yet to come to fruition asBerners-Lee had originally dreamed.
Now that you are getting interested in implementing Microformats on your sites, you may find a cheat sheet of all major Microformats for fast reference a handy tool. Brian Suda, the author of this useful cheat sheet also wrote a book on Microformats, published by O’reilly. Think Vitamin reviewed the 45 page PDF book favorably.
The Web Standards Project has assembled a Dreamweaver task force to try to lobby Adobe to better implement web standards in their software (although Dreamweaver has come a long way in this respect already). One useful outcome of their efforts is an extension for Dreamweaver that simplifies the implementation of Microformats. Microformats is one of the hottest buzzwords as of late, and for good reason. It’s goal is to standardize the way in which we use XHTML to markup information such as calendar events, contact information, etc. so we can build scripts and applications that can see the meaning in this content and do something useful with it. An example might be a community calendar application that could gather all events from sites that list events in a certain area. A program could not make any sense out of this content unless it had a standardized way of identifying each piece. To learn more, visit Microformats.org.
The Microformats extensions allows you to quickly markup contact info, events, references to friends/colleagues sites, and site licensing in this standardized format. Learning to do this on your own is also pretty easy, as Microformats uses XHTML tags you already know, but names classes for these tags according to the data it encloses. Once you install the extension, look at your Insert palette in Dreamweaver where you will find the Microformats menu item added.
