Microformats
Microformats are an HTML standard that express people, events, reviews, recipes, datestamped content, and other structured data in web pages in a way that makes them easily usable by web browser, search engines, and other web crawlers.
Web browsers in particular are able to associate the data with particular actions and provide a richer user experience for pages marked up with microformats.
Common Microformats
- hCard - people and organizations
- hCalendar - events
- hReview - reviews of places, people, events, products, etc.
- hAtom - blog posts, status updates, and any kind of episodic content
- adr - structured addresses
- geo - latitude/longitude geolocations
- see http://microformats.org/wiki/ for more.
Platform
Firefox has some microformats parsing support in the Toolkit "product", microformats "component":
FirefoxOS
microformats support in FirefoxOS (Gaia/System/Microformats) will help users by automatically detecting venues, people, contacts, events, locations and integrating with built-in contacts, calendar, and mapping user interfaces.
microformats parsing can be used by Firefox to enhance the "Share" (paper airplane) button.
Shopping
microformats such as hReview, hProduct, and hListing provide an open way for merchants to publish their product information, items for sale, and for Firefox to help the user shop for things.
Firefox Implementation Introduction
For background information on microformat detection, please see this series of blog posts by Alex Faaborg:
- Part 0: Introduction
- Part 1: Structured Data Chaos
- Part 2: The Fundamental Types
- Part 3: Introducing Operator
- Part 4: The User Interface of Microformat Detection
User Experience
- Brainstorming page about the user experience of microformat detection, please feel free to contribute any design work, or to comment on these conceptual mockups.
- Information about about the user interface of microformat detection can also be found on the microformats.org wiki
Firefox 3
Implementation
Michael Kaply is working on the microformats implementation in Firefox 3. There is some overlap with the content handling work being done by Dan Mosedale, and Alex Faaborg is working on the user interface.
Module
microformats is implemented in a module in Firefox.