Why Microformats?

Microformats are an independent way to represent information so that it can be easily displayed in a web site and used by any software.

Microformat data is normally stored in a text file in an XML format. So a piece of data to represent a blood glucose reading might be formatted as follows:

<div class="vevent" id="hcalendar-Blood-Glucose-Reading">

    <abbr class="dtstart" title="20070517T0812-0400">May 17, 2007 8:12am</abbr></abbr>

    <span class="summary">Blood Glucose Reading</span>

    <span class="location">Meter 2AS234</span>

    <div class="description">136</div>

</div>

This format is similar to the standard hCalendar format.

By following this supported format, we can take advantage of various microformat tools to do things such as import our blood glucose readings into Outlook or some other calendaring software.

More About Microformats

I've started reading the book Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0

by John Allsopp, and today I see that Digital Web Magazine has a short interview with John.

You may be interested in listening to this conversation about microformats between Alex Barnett, Tantek Çelik, Dan Connolly and Rohit Khare. The audio link is about half-way down the page.