This post was actually inspired by Kyle Neath’s article “I just don’t get this whole Microformats thing”, where the author is expressing his own frustration about the Microformats movement being over-complexified. It really reminded me of one of my pet peeve’s on the subject.

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.

Now this is the definition of Microformats, from microformats.org, and I really disagree with the first half… Designed for humans first and machines second.In my mind Microformats exist for a single purpose - as a way to semantically define common data types, from simple data types such as coordinates, currency, temperature to much more complex types such as events, reviews and people. This is done by building structure on-top of existing standards, such as HTML, in such a way that it is transparent to the end-user. This structure is what allows Microformats to be remotely useful - its a means for identifying data so that it can be consumed.So who actually consumes a Microformat? The sidebar of this webpage contains a hCard, and there are other Microformats scattered throughout the site. Most user’s don’t know they are there, and even if they weren’t, the content would still look exactly the same. So, the user can’t really be considered the consumer.If we look at some of the software out there which utilize Microformats, they mostly perform three actions:

• Detection. The identification of Microformats within a page.
• Consumption. The extraction of data within a Microformat.
• Utilization. Doing something with the data.

These are common across many applications, for example, if we look at the Geo Microformat, an application based on that structure may perform the following functions:

• Detect presence of a Geo within a page.
• Extract coordinate values.
• Pass the coordinates to Google Earth for viewing.

Detect. Consume. Utilize. If we look at another use case:

• Detect a hCard on a page.
• Extract hCard values.
• Import contact into iCal as a vCard.

Detect. Consume. Utilize.In fact, thats Microformats in a nutshell… Detect… Consume… Utilize… - they make it easy to get at your data, like giving your Web page its own API. Data can become more portable, with it becoming a trivial task to click on a name on Web page and have them added to your address book, and data can be leveraged by other applications in new and interesting ways.Now, some of cases are all possible with or with-out Microformats, its just that Microformats make the Detection and Consumption a great deal easier (otherwise you would need to be doing a lot of text analysis and pattern matching) and more accurate. A lot of potential services, undoubtedly the cooler and more useful ones, which follow the DCU model are only made possible by Microformats due to the complexities of D and C - unless the data is revealed in some way, an application or service cannot interact with it.Although designing for humans is a great philosophy, in this case its a bit inaccurate. At the core you are designing for software… for consumption. It is not humans who are doing this consumption, thats pretty much guaranteed, but rather it is humans who are and will be seeing the benefits of microformats. Wether it is ease of use, portability of data or otherwise. (more…)

Taking some time out from Adobe MAX 2006 to plug a site for a friend. Expect some thoughts on MAX as soon as I step away from the bar/slot machines!Why Microformats is an excellent series of articles which Andy has been painstakingly writing over the past few weeks, I’ve also been proof reading (”Yeah, it looks good, there are loads of long words.”) without rest! They attempt to peel back the shroud of mystery surrounding Microformats, looking at where they have came from and what value they add to the Web as a whole. It also speculates on ways Microformats can be consumed, making them inherently useful to the end user.Worth a read - it should wet your appetites! (more…)

Well its been a fun weekend - I went up to London with Mr. Dreyfuss for the Microformats vEvent at the Brew Wharf. True to form, it was an alcohol fueled evening, culminating in a cheeky pint at 4am in a lesbian bar back in Brighton!Given that our next project revolves around Microformats (I’ve been sworn to secrecy apparently, but on a unrelated note I have been brushing up on my Objective C lately…), it was good to actually talk to people who also spend a bit of time scratching their heads and thinking “Hmm… how could these things be useful?”.From an outsiders perspective, its interesting that the focus seems to be mostly on the ‘complex’ formats, describing contacts, events, reviews, resume’s etc. Especially as I’m a lot more interested in the more simple formats such as currency, geo etc. Why? Two reasons:

• They are easy to detect. Lets face it, most people are lazy and when we talk about content creators then what incentive do they have to use microformats if they either don’t understand how to use them, or have to do extra work in order to integrate them. The more you can automate this, the more people will use them. This is fairly trivial if you are pulling data from a database and then presenting it on a Web page - you already know what data items you are dealing with - but if you take an example of a blogger, then you are just adding overhead.Ideally we want to move toward a scenario where content management systems and blogging engines can take a chunk of free form text, recognize that it contains certain data which can be represented as a microformat and then add the markup. The problem? How would you go about writing a parser that can recognize hCards? Its a slightly complex task! On the other hand, it is a lot easier to parse some text and recognize things such as currency values, coordinates, temperatures etc. Focusing on these low-level formats provides a way to quickly get these formats being used, and puts you in a much better position to tackle the challenge of automating the creation of hCards, hEvents and more complex formats.
• They are things I often want to do things with. Take the currency example, I’m on an American website and I want to know how much something will cost in UK Pounds, I open a new window, fire up XE.com and use the convertor. Wouldn’t it be so much easier if this was done by the browser, either automagically, or when I click on the price…

Any thoughts on this are welcome, not being part of the Microformats inner circle, I may just be spouting total crap, but from a developers perspective the smaller formats are what I think could be most useful in the short term in order to get more people producing microformats.In other news, I may see some of you at the Sussex Geek Dinner on Wednesday - I fully expect to end up totally hammered and swimming in the sea! Also off back to the US next week - currently my itinerary includes Las Vegas (Adobe MAX ‘06), Phoenix, Denver and New York - it should be a nice chance to do some christmas shopping! Hopefully I should be back in Brighton for Flash on the Beach. I’m quite enjoying work at the moment - aside from the travel, its quite interesting at the moment - our new homepage is launching later this month and its looking funky!On the blog front, possibly considering a move to Mephisto when I get time, and stay tuned for an article later this week talking about structuring development teams for more effective Web development. Its something partially inspired by what I have been doing recently at work, and also by some of the sessions at dConstruct. Until then, have a nice week! (more…)