About Microformats and the Internet
By Pankaj Maru
Mumbai, May 13, 2008

The rich internet content on web pages is embedded and wrapped in various semantic structured codes of HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), XML (Extensible Markup Language), and XHTML (Extensible Hyper Text Markup Language).

While, the web rich content remains tagged and intact in semantic structured codes, now an attempt is being made to free and reuse the content. Using microformats the content will offer greater accessibility and benefits to users.

Microformats are simple open data formats developed over the existing standards. However, microformats are promoted and advocated by a group of volunteers who have formed a community which is involved in the development and research of microformats. However, microformats are still at a very nascent stage.

According to Sriram Narayan, advisor to the CTO of ThoughtWorks, "The content locked up on web pages needs to be free and marked up to add more interactivity, so that interactive semantic websites are developed."

Narayan is a creator of PoshZone - a site about bazaar (market) approach to the semantic web that talks about microformats and its uses.

The official microformats.org site defines microformats as, "Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards." The site is a community of voluntary users of microformats.

The whole concept of microformats is to not create any thing new, but to modify the existing standards of HTML and other codes over the published content. It makes possible to create meta-content that adds more visibility and ease the search operations. This way it tries to decentralize the content and services.

"It's (microformats) an approach towards making the web content portable on the internet. It's an extension of the existing codes. With the use of simple script that marks up the content on the website, the piece of information can be transformed from one portal to other and so more semantic websites can be developed," explains Narayan.

Further he explains giving an example about how to add any event information using specific microformats - hCalender. "The particular event information will be captured, moved and stored to the calendar on the Yahoo account via hCalender," he says.

Similarly there are several other codes such as hCard for adding contact details of personal and business, hResume for resumes or curriculum vitae, hReview for review, XFN for social networks, XOXO for list and outlines and many more.

Many experts believe that microformats will change the future of websites in many ways. Both microformats and blogging can work together as it will bring websites nearer to the user's blog and allow information retrieval without making it necessary to visit the website. This can be done using specific microformats.

Simply put, it's a way to get information to the users and not the latter reaching out to information or websites. It's a reverse of the trend that exists and followed by the web world.

Among the large users of microformats are bloggers, content providers, and service provides. Also it's supported by web browsers like Firefox with the plug-in Operator, Mozilla and Yahoo. Microformats' has also received a good support from Wikipedia and has its own dedicated kind of microformats wikipedia.

While, microformats is at a nascent stage, its coding for information integration or content does obstruct it from reaching to common end users. "For integrating the blog post with microformats or any other websites does demand a good level of programming knowledge and skills. Hence it's not easy for any simple end user to work or use microformats," explains Kiruba Shankar, CEO of Business Blogging and founder of F5ive Technologies, a company based in Chennai.

Although, microformats attempt to decentralize the content embedded in structured codes on the website there does exist the fear of spam and malicious content getting linked with it.

Microformats once attached with a piece of information or any particular content appear in the form of a symbol or a hyper link on the web browser. As browsers fail to differentiate between any spam and hyperlinked microformats, there's room for exploitation and causing of security threats by spam developers.

"There will always be a small section of population who will manipulate the good things and use it for other purposes. Here too microformats can be used for forwarding malicious content and spam," concludes Shankar.


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Beyond Blogging
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