Productivity Portfolio

When you read a web page such as this, you're seeing the friendly side that is public facing. If you were to view the HTML source code, a much different picture appears. That page is designed for your browser and difficult to read unless you know the markup language. Each view has its purpose and problems.

As example, if I'm writing a software review, how do I construct the page so it is readable to the audience, but understood as being a product review by another application such as a web crawler? Early on, authors might have used “product review” as META keywords to help classify their page.

Sadly, people starting abusing these tags and stuffed them with irrelevant keywords in the hopes of getting traffic. The result is few search engines use these keyword tags for their intended purpose. The other problem is you need more than standard keywords to define the data.

Defining Microformats

Some smart people got together and decided to find a better way to define web content. The goal is to use HTML to define new structures using current standards. Another aim is to make the formats human readable, but structured enough for another application to use the data. The result is a simple set of data formats called microformats.

You may recall in my article on our custom search engine, I created a “refinement” for product reviews. Google allows you to search by many parameters, but reviews are not one of them. Without such a structure, I mainly relied on synonyms. In looking for a better solution, I stumbled on microformats and discovered there is a structure called hReview. This structure would allow me to code my articles so they could be interpreted by other applications as being a product review. There is even a hReview creator that can jump start the process for me.

This microformat allows me to write in the same fashion using HTML, but add some code that better defines the content. Specifically, I can add a numeric product rating, version, review date, picture and so on. It's a minimal set of data fields that are common to just about any type of reviews. In my case, I would use it for product reviews and website reviews, but the same structure could be applied to car mechanics, conference speakers, or resorts.

The hReview microformat is just one a series of open standards by the Microformats.org . Some of these are formalized such as hCard and hCalendar and others are in draft. These last two formats build on the previous work on vCards and iCalendar. Other microformats are for resumes, voting, tags, social networks and so on.

The Uses of Microformats

You're probably wondering how you would benefit from microformats. After all, not all of you publish web pages. As publishers add definition to web pages with microformats, the pages open up in new ways much like people created mashups with Google maps. Specialized programs will evolve that will aggregate or mine info and present it in new ways. You may even be able share data between the web and your desktop along the lines of Microsoft's Live Clipboard.

Currently, we're in a bit of chicken and egg scenario as microformats are still young. But some big players see the benefits such as Yahoo!, Technorati, Microsoft and Flickr to name a few. Ironically, I started this quest to build a better Google custom search engine for readers. Now, that I've found a format that helps, I note Google doesn't support microformats. Moving forward, I think I'll start using the format and see who else tags along.

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