Microformats: Digging Deeper into the Web [ABSTRACT]
Jinfo Blog

By Ben Ward

Abstract

Extracting, repurposing and combining information is a core activity for info pros so it's good to know that we are being helped with this on the Web, even if we are not aware of it. Ben Ward describes how microformats - vocabularies which enable recurring information to be described and then reused - are making content available in a richer form and facilitating the combining of data. 

Item

Extracting, repurposing and combining information is a core activity for info pros so it's good to know that we are being helped with this on the Web, even if we are not aware of it. Ben Ward describes how microformats - vocabularies which enable recurring information to be described and then reused - are making content available in a richer form and facilitating the combining of data.

What's Inside:

Microformats were invented to make it possible for recurring content like news updates, contact details and event information to be reused; consumed in simple, common ways and understandable between different applications. Microformats are primarily vocabularies plus a small handful of parsing patterns for developers so are easy to implement. The most significant implementation so far came when Google implemented an enhancement to Google Search called Rich Snippets resulting in search result listings now being enhanced using page content marked up with microformats.

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