Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0

By John Allsopp

In this book, noted web developer and long time WaSP member John Allsop offers practical examples to teach readers all they need to know about Microformats. Coverage details what Microformats are currently available and how to use them; the general principles of how they work; how to use Microformats with web sites and software that already support them; and how readers can create their own. The end of the book features a chapter full of anecdotes from many professional web designers and developers already using Microformats in their work today--what worked, what didn't, things to watch for--so that readers can learn from their experiences.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1590598148
• ISBN13: 9781590598146
• Release Date: March 2007
• Publisher: Apress
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.61 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 7.6" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Great Comprehensive Book on Microforats

I would highly recommend purchasing this book if you are at all involved in constructing the XHTML for website pages. Microformats will become increasingly more important in the coming years. The book is well organized (one of the best organized technical books I have read in a very long time). I would love to see an updated editon of this book come out in the near future to update us on any newer microformats that are available (which you can always check out a microformats.org) and also on companies that have since begun to use microformats (even more than say Yahoo! and Technorati). Thanks for such a wonderfully written book.

Much better than I expected

Most of the buzz I heard around Microformats has been just that - noise. This book was the first time I read solid reasons to begin incorporating Microformats in my markup. He does a great job of explaining theory, use and then providing use examples for the various formats - and I also appreciated his showing css concepts for styling the information even if on first glance it seemed a bit off topic. I still feel completely undersold on the XFN concept - neat for blogs but for corporate development just not so useful - but I recommend reading the chapter anyway to pick up a few concepts he hides in there. Overall definitly worth buying and reading.

Excellent Resource

Few books actually give the why and reasoning behind various technologies. For instance, pick up that latest Java book and what do you find? Someone's simply dumped the API, but that does really tell you about how to use the information. Such things bug me. Microformats doesn't bug me. Infact, I was happily surprised by it. In a nutshell, in addition to using class information on an HTML tag as a means of using CSS for presentation, you can also use it for conveying information. Microformats are well thought out nested elements that provide human readable text, but machine processable content. The idea is fairly trivial, which is why it works so well. Turns out there are all kinds of wonderful applications, and this book walks you through the problem that's being solved, shows why the solution is elegant, gives you plenty of examples, and then demonstrates how to not just create, but to detect and read Microformats. As an added bonus, the book touches on all kinds of little developer tools, tricks, and browser extensions that just are plain usable. In short, the book over delivers without being verbose.

Definitive Book

First off - my apologies to the author, John Allsopp, for this review not being marked-up in the hReview format. That being said, I have definitely gleaned no small amount of ideas from his Microformats Book, and will be implementing them when I design future sites. What exactly are microformats? Think of them as small, semantic enhancements to existing markup. They also ease aggregation of data. According to the official site... "Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging)." Perhaps the easiest microformat to describe is the XFN format, which grew out of a 2004 discussion amongst Eric Meyer, Matt Mullenweg and Tantek Çelik in Austin, TX at SXSW Interactive. It basically involves using the underutilized rel attribute to indicate relationship between yourself and the owner of a page to which you are linking. Simple - right? Yes, and that's the point. Microformats are not some new language you have to master, simply using agreed upon uses of existing tags, attributes and CSS classes to build richer categorization of data. Another microformat, pioneered by Google, is that of rel-nofollow. "No follow" is a bit of a misnomer, because search engines will still crawl and index the link. However, they will not take that link into consideration when calculating the PageRank of the URL destination. A common use of rel-nofollow is linking to someone who has ripped off your work, in which case you want to call attention to, but not reward the misdeed. Beyond the rel-* microformats, there are more robust types such as geo, which allows you to pinpoint locations via latitude and longitude. This can be seen on sites like Flickr, allowing users to specify exactly where photos were taken. It's plain to see that using microformats needn't be intimidating. It's simply using POSH patterns, as Jeremy Keith has described it. Rather than invent your own XML schema for every project, and having to go through the hassle of creating a new DTD, we use building blocks that are already available to us. I don't know about you, but I'd rather use microformats than re-invent the wheel, such as the 900+ line DTD for XHTML 1.0 Strict... http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd There are a variety of other microformats available, such as hCard, hCalendar, vote-links, rel-license and rel-tag. I am also keeping an eye on hResume (currently in draft status), for when I redesign my own site. The professional networking site LinkedIn already uses hResume extensively. Microformats aren't just for start-ups. Even big dogs like Yahoo make use of them on sites such as Upcoming. The blog aggregating site Technorati also uses them - particularly the rel-tag microformat, allowing them to create tag cloud

The definitive guide to Microformats

Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 by John Allsopp is an incredible resource for learning Microformats. I didn't know what to expect with this book, as part of me wondered how someone could take over 300 pages to talk about Microformats. Truth be told -- this book was very in-depth from cover to cover. Microformats are still in their infancy, being just a few years old. However, as we see throughout this book -- there are many big players who are staking ground in the value and use of Microformats. I recently read HTML Mastery which scratched the surface of the power of Microformats. I would consider this book The Official Guide To Microformats with all of the information available. Here is a brief glimpse of what is found in this resource: The book is broken down into 5 parts, but I will look over each chapter individually. Chapter 1 answers the question "What are Microformats?" This is a thorough introduction to Microformats, the semantic web, the benefits of using Microformats -- as well as it's origins, definition, and principles. The principles include: - Solve a specific problem. - Start as simply as possible. - Are designed for humans first, machines second. - Reuse building blocks from widely adopted standards. - Are modular and embeddable. Enable and encourage decentralized development, content, and services. These are vital to the heart of Microformats. Though the web is aspiring to be semantic -- we still have many problems to solve to help out our machine friends in the process of making sense of our language. Chapter 2 gives us some quick snapshot views into how Microformats are currently being used. Discussions of browsers, their support, and their future. It is exciting to see the possibilities of Microformats being built into the browsers -- since they are decentralized they will allow us to find things much easier (and make sense of those things). There are currently many tools available to aid a developer in creating the necessary markup and structure for formats. It is important to note that Microformats are not a new language, but are simply built onto already existing XHTML. The author presents the chicken and egg struggle and where Microformats are already being used in the wild. A few of those include, Yahoo, Cork'd and Apple. Not only are there early adopters on board, but there are services to help people make sense of the content. A few of these services include Technorati and Pingerati. These services all you to generate vCards from your properly formatted hCards. It also allows you to submit your site for Microformats searching. These are some powerful tools that will only continue to expand and grow. Chapter 3 discusses the necessary foundation to create Microformats -- Semantic HTML. The author discusses the days of the web where HTML was wrongly turned into a presentational language. HTML is a structure. It is semantic. It gives meaning to your documents. Your presentation layer belongs in your C