MaisonBisson.com » microformats

Yelp: A Poster Child For Semantic Markup

Casey Bisson — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:48:24 +0000

Yelp…is…essentially a poster-child for semantic markup. This spring, Google’s introduction of rich snippets has allowed Yelp’s listings in the SERPs to stand out more, attracting consumers to click more due to the “bling” decorating the listings in the form of the star ratings.

There are now some very good reasons why sites with ratings and reviews should be adopting microformats, and it’s not that hard to do! For a more detailed explanation, read my recap on the subject, Why Use Microformats?

hNews Might Not Be So Bad

Casey — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 15:29:37 +0000

The AP’s diagram of their Protect, Point, Pay “news DRM” scheme looked like a joke, then I saw the parody.

Despite all the smoke and hype, Ed Felton explains that it’s underwhelming, at most. Still, hNews might be an interesting format for some blogs to adopt. Most of what the AP is rattling their saber about is in the rights (containing ccREL declarations). Felton thinks the dependence on ccREL may extend derivative usage rights, rather than limit them. ccREL, after all, “states unequivocally that it does not limit users’ rights already granted by copyright and can only convey further rights to the user.”

Okay, so hNews mightn’t be so bad, but what’s good about it? It brings together a number of pieces that we all expect in a news story (and many other stories). It makes it easy to identify the dateline and geocoding of a particular story, as well as the publisher and its principles.

Oddly, the format doesn’t appear to address media within the content, but perhaps they expect us to leverage Media RSS and rel=image_src links.

Google Recommends Microformats and RDFa

Casey Bisson — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 19:11:24 +0000

Google’s own webmasters help site recommends microformats and RDFa structured data to improve indexing and usefulness of the data. Review metadata appears to have full support, while people, product, and business data are in beta.

OpenSearch Progress

Casey Bisson — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 00:18:27 +0000

I really need to keep better tabs on Michael Fagan, as his June 11 OpenSearch Update is full of goodies.

OpenSearch, OpenSearch referrer extension, extensions, microformats, search suggestions

IdM Takes Lessons From the Microformats Crowd

Casey Bisson — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 02:46:07 +0000

A tip from Ryan sent me looking at MicroID:

a new Identity layer to the web and Microformats that allows anyone to simply claim verifiable ownership over their own pages and content hosted anywhere.

The idea is to hash a user’s email address (or other identifier) with the name of the site it will be published on, giving a string that can be inserted — in true Microformats style — as an element of the html on the site.

Examples:

To verify a user’s home page or ownership of any page:

... ...

To verify a user’s membership in (or content/microformat published on) any (trusted) 3rd party site:

Joe Friday +1-919-555-7878 Area Administrator, Assistant

To validate a user’s feedback or reputation on any moderated system (slashdot, digg, etc):

5

I’ve gotta admit that it seems too simple to work and I’m gonna have to think about this a while.

Once this [MicroID] is published via one of the number of different ways or as part of a microformat on any page or site, they appear as opaque strings, but unique to a particular ID on that site. When the owner of the communication identifier forms a relationship with a new site, and (critical) that new site validates the communication identifier, they can then immediately validate the MicroID published on any other site for that given communication identifier.

MicroID also allows any third party to crawl and index these microformats and provide a web service that may return a weighted response (for reputations), list of references, etc. This index is anonymous and queries into it may simply provide the hashed version of a validated user-provided communication identifier.

While it may seem that spoofing would be an issue due to the nature of using communication idenitifers and how widely they are sometimes shared or published, the assertion of ownership must always originate from the owner, the MicroID simply allows anyone to validate that relationship very simply.

identity, identity architecture, identity assertion, identity management, identity verification, idm, microformats, microid, identity, identity architecture, identity assertion, identity management, identity verification, idm, microformats, microid

Microformats

Casey Bisson — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 15:14:24 +0000

Oliver Brown introduced me to microformats a while ago, the Ryan Eby got excited about them, then COinS-PMH showed how useful they could be for libraries, but I still haven’t done anything with them myself (other than beg Peter Binkley to release his COinS-PMH WordPress Plugin).

What are microformats? Garrett Dimon explains the theory:

When writing markup against deadlines and priorities, it’s easy to forget that somebody else will eventually have to maintain it. Conveniently, some of the central ideas behind microformats revolve around the fact that they are designed for humans first and created with simplicity in mind. This means you’ll have markup that is easy to understand and maintain for everyone, including:

The engineer integrating your code next week

You updating your code next month

The new guy taking over your job when you get promoted next year

Basically, microformats suggest the use of common class names for various XHTML elements. As it turns out, the hCard microformat is a convenient way of representing the data from vCards in XHTML. The convenience is by design, of course. Here’s an example:

Casey Bisson MaisonBisson

By standardizing the class names for this content, it’s easier to share and maintain stylesheets, re-use content, and read the content programatically. Perhaps most importantly, it offers valuable tips to search engines crawling your site about what the data is, making it more findable.

The principles of microformats are such:

solve a specific problem
design for humans first, machines second
reuse building blocks from widely adopted standards
modularity / embeddability
enable and encourage decentralized and distributed development, content, services

The potential here for libraries is huge, but we should take seriously the caution that microformats be easy to use and the design rule that it be simple.

microformat, networked information, semantic web, microformats, library, libraries, metadata, data standards