microformats
are HTML for marking up
people, organizations
,
events
,
locations
,
blog posts
,
products
,
reviews
,
resumes
,
recipes
etc. Sites use microformats to publish a standard API that is consumed and used by
search engines
,
browsers
, and other web sites. See
what-are-microformats
for more.
- See
microformats2
for a technical overview and summary of how to use microformats on public web pages and for APIs.
Introduction
This wiki is the central resource of the microformats community and provides microformats authoring guides, references, specifications, drafts, publishing patterns, research, brainstorming, and issue tracking.
Get Started
Get started with microformats:
How to contribute
Want to join in and contribute?
This wiki has a number of enhancements to assist development and contributions to microformats. Before you start editing, see the
wiki introduction page
for instructions.
Specifications
microformats2
is stable, has a test suite, publishers, and interoperable implementations. Use it on public web pages and developing more parsers and applications.
Current, stable microformats open standard specifications.
Parsing
If you are implementing a microformats2 parser, see:
Vocabularies
microformats2 vocabularies:
rel microformats
Some microformats require only a rel attribute and are widely supported by consuming sites and software.
- rel-author
- link to the author's home page (from an article)
- rel-enclosure
- link to attachments (e.g. files) to download and cache
- rel-license
- licensed content
- rel-nofollow
- links in untrusted 3rd party content
- rel-tag
- tag posts and pages by subject
- XFN
- social relationships and
rel-me
links among profiles for the same person
Classic Microformats
In addition use well established classic microformats for the primary subject of a page for legacy
search engines
support.
- adr
- address location information
- geo
- latitude & longitude location (
WGS84
geographic coordinates)
Classic Drafts
Drafts are classic microformats which have varying degrees of support by consuming applications. They are stable and yet still open to change based on consuming application support, per the
process
to become specifications.
- hNews
- news articles, extension of hAtom
- XMDP
- define a microformat vocabulary / profile
- XOXO
- outlines
If you're tempted to try your hand at writing a microformat please read
the process
page first!
and then take a look at
exploratory-discussions
for details of prior research, analysis of real-world
examples
, existing formats, and brainstorming of possible new microformats, per the microformats
process
.
Design Patterns
Design patterns are common uses of markup across microformats.
Archived
Past specifications, drafts, and exploratory discussions which have either lacked (or lost) wide publishing support, implementation, or have been superceded by newer specs (see also
when does it make sense to demote a microformat spec
). These may eventually be retired, deprecated, or reincorporated into other exploratory discussions.
Examples
Resources
See
resources
.
User centric development
Shared work areas
Tools, test cases, additional research
The first place to look for examples, code, and test cases is in the pages for each individual microformat. There are only a few cross-cutting
tools and services
that need to process more than one microformat. That section is intended for editors,
parsers
,
validators
, test cases, and other information relevant across multiple microformats.
Microformats wiki translations
You may read and edit microformats articles in many other languages:
- languages with over 100 articles
- languages with over 10 articles
- languages with over 2 articles
- languages just started
- elsewhere
See also
other-languages
, and
how-to-start-a-new-translation
.
microformats.org
is
a community focused on using an empirical (rather than aspirational)
process
to research web data & information human publishing behaviors, openly document it on our wiki (
http://microformats.org/wiki/
), discuss it in
IRC
(
irc://irc.freenode.net/microformats
), then brainstorm ideas & proposals based on that research for simple formats based on HTML to interoperably represent that information on the web, incrementally implement, and iterate.