How microformats will simplify the web
George Malamidis, April 17th, 2007For the humorous sake of it, let me start with what I don’t like about Microformats. To cite the site (heh..) Microformats are “Designed for humans first and machines second”. Every time I see the word “humans” in relation to something to do with technology, I kind of turn red. Partly because I’m the sort of person who would always choose to use the ATM instead of going through the Human Bank-Employee, partly because everything designed for humans is going to end up being used most and foremost by spammers.
You see, there’s no denying that software is meant to be used by or facilitate the lives of humans, things like Microformats however are only interesting – and, at least at a low level, are destined to remain so – to a very specific subset of humans: Programmers. So I’d be way better off spared the hippy humane talk.
Having gotten this semantic (there we go…) complaint off my chest, I think Microformats are great. In fact, I find them to be an idea as big as REST over SOAP style Web Services.
The magic lies in the simplicity that escorts Microformats and the household status of their platform. There’s no funny/strict schema in a mile, only mere semantic enhancements to one of the most widely used mediums on the web today: HTML (primarily, although I think it should be exclusively).
Let’s take the following example of something reminiscent of a weblog post:
<html>
<head><title>Who needs Atom?</title></head>
<body>
<h1>Who >needs Atom?</h1>
<h2>
Posted on Friday, April 13, 2007
by Dave Mustaine
</h2>
<p>
Really... Who needs it? Or RSS, come to think of it...
</p>
</body>
</html>
Now, let’s add a tiny bit of non-intrussive, albeit meaningful semantic coating to our mark-up:
<html>
<head><title>Who needs Atom?</title></head>
<body>
<h1 class="title">Who needs Atom?</h1>
<h2>
Posted on <span class="date">Friday, April 13, 2007</span>
by <span class="author">Dave Mustaine</span>
</h2>
<p class="content">
Really... Who needs it? Or RSS, for the part?...
</p>
</body>
</html>
Suddenly, our document can say a lot to a syndication engine or human developer with a website scraping API at hand. And there’s no need to maintain a feed.xml, or anything similar. The website really is the weblog.
What Microformats, alongside REST are proudly showcasing is how much can be achieved by concentrating on two simple things: Meaningful URLs (Where the resources are and will be) and meaningful mark-up (What the resources are about). Once this is achieved, anyone can do whatever they want with them, because the only thing a website needs to qualify as a weblog, resume, web-service API – and the beat goes on… – is a little bit of meaning.