I’ve been hearing a lot about microformats lately, and I just don’t understand the hype from a developers perspective.
For those of you who haven’t really been initiated to microformats they’re basically XHTML tag structures for specific types of information.
What are microformats from the microformats.org site…
Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. What a way to say nothing.
Microformats are simple conventions for embedding semantics in HTML to enable decentralized development. buzzz… wordzzz…
there are more at http://microformats.org/wiki/what-are-microformats
So embedding semantics in XHTML and other XML derived formats sounds like a generally useful idea, and a great move toward interoperability.
However, I haven’t see significant discussions of the benefits of implementing microformats, besides your content will be more semantic. Are there tools that take advantage of these? Who is implementing tools to use microformats? How will they make my life easier? How will a format designed for humans first make it any easier to index. Most search engines aren’t indexing document structure metadata.
I’m still reading and learning about them, but I haven’t seen anything that screams there is a real advantage in implementing microformats for inter-application communication.
The only real immediate advantage for microformats on the web, in my opinion, is having a generic XHTML structure to style making information more visually recognizable.
So far my conclusions about microformats is let them live in the design world, until they become standard there and applications start popping up that take advantage of them. Then re-examine the benefits of using them in you applications for interoperability.