Microformats
December 16th, 2006 by Ivan Uzunov
“Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging).” Source: http://microformats.org/about/
I really like microformats because they allow machines to export data like contacts in vCard format with a simple change of existing code. With a few simple CSS class additions I’ve created a web site that supports microformats.
More information how to use microformats can be found on the official web page: http://microformats.org/. The site includes hCard, hCalendar and hReview creators that will show you how the microformats are embedded in XHTML for example.
This is a simple example of HTML with added microformats hCard:
<div class="vcard">
<a class="url fn" href="http://www.ivanuzunov.net/">Ivan Uzunov</a>
<div class="org">Uzunov Ltd.</div>
<a class="email" href="mailto:myemail@uzunov.com">myemail@uzunov.com</a>
</div>
To take advantage from microformats as a simple website user you will need a tool that extracts the data from the web site page and allows you to do something with it. For example it can import contacts data into your email client. I’m using these two Firefox extensions:
- Tails Export (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2240/)
I prefer this one but is not supported in Firefox 2.0 yet.
- Operator (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/4106/)
Of course the microformats could be dangerous because of spammers. They could easily collect email addresses.
Firefox plugin, hCalendar, hCard, hReview, Microformats, vCard
Hi Ivan,
There is also Tails - http://blog.codeeg.com/tails-firefox-extension-03/ (not the same as Tails Export, and works in 2.0).
As to email harvesting - I think that battle is lost - spammers generate email addresses using domain names, submit to contact forms, and can opretty much decipher any obfuscated email address.
I think the real challenge with email now is to make the ratio of legitimate use to illegitimate use of emails higher - and the techniques we typically use to make spammers life more difficult in harvesting also make legitimate use more difficult too.
hCard makes legitimate use of email addresses, phone, fax, street addreses and so on easier - both for the casual user of your site, but ultimately for software.
That’s my take on it at any rate,
thanks
j