Saturday, February 28, 2009

Interstingly, when typing the term "microformats", my hand confuses my brain to type "Microsoft". :) However, it took some period to adopt this standard by major web vendors Microsoft and Mozilla.

What is Microformats?
This is one way of enabling web as semantic. The current web markups are very keen on displaying content on the browsers. As an user we know what is on the page, as a system it just displays it. However, how can develop a system to organize, collect and manage the contents from web pages? Previously, it is impossible. There are millions of terra bytes of content exist in the web. But now, Semantic Web which was initiated by Tim Berner Lee helps us to make this possible.

Microformats are one such standard which reuse existing markup elements to convey semantic of the data. For example, the following snippet shows a hCard telephone contact details.


<span class="tel">
<span class="type">home</span>:
<span class="value">+91.044.111090190</span>
</span>
Oomph

Microsoft Oomph is a toolkit to for web developers, designers and users, making it easier to create, consume, and style Microformats. It comes up with:
  • IE add-in to parse Microformats in web pages.
  • Pre-defined CSS styles for Microformats.
  • A cross-browser HTML overlay for Microformats aggregation.
Visit: http://oomph.codeplex.com/ to know more and download the toolkit.

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