Findability Mini-Site
Presentation
A small presentation on Microformats
Intro
If you’re like me from a week ago, you might be asking yourself
What on Earth is a Microformat?
Well shhhhhhhh and I'll tell you, okay?
This here is a microformat!
Now you understand right?
No?
Let me elaborate…
What is a microformat
Yeah… This doesn’t really clear anything up, this just looks like normal HTML code.
It isn’t even semantic! What makes this a microformat?
I was confused at first too, it just looks like a snippet of html, but what’s so special about this code is that it conforms to the microformat standards for an hCard, which search engines and other robots know how to read and parse.
The important parts of this hCard code are the class names given to the elements and their structure within the hCard.
A lot of these microformats contain a basic structure and some required properties to be valid and conform to the standard. But they also have a lot of optional properties too, that can let you customize your hCard and other microformats to a great degree. Which is good because having to stick to a standard for a format can seem quite limiting at first.
The HTML elements are sometimes specified to be a certain element as well, but this isn’t always the case.
Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t make your hCards or other microformats also semantic; you should be trying to achieve both, although the hCard creator used to generate this code just doesn’t for whatever reason.
Try checking around for different generators, the ones on the microformats wiki work well enough but there might be others out there that work better for you.
Why use a microformat
Using hCards or other microformats on your website to structure specific data allows robots to read information from your site, which can help with findability and SEO.
There is a whole page on the microformats wiki about what you can do with microformats!
All in all, there are more than just hCards; there are all sorts of microformats that you can use for data on your website!
It is also important to consider how these formats can assist disabled visitors too. They might be using special browsers or devices for browsing the web, and having these standards and formats that are widely adopted can make the proccess for these users easier and maybe even possible at all.
What microformats are there
I keep mentioning “hCards or other microformats”, but what are these other microformats? Here is a list of some of the "Classic Microformats"!
- hAtom - for articles or blog posts
- hCalendar - for events
- hCard - for a card with details about a person/orginisation
- hProduct - for a product
- hRecipe - for a cooking recipe
- hReview - for a review or rating
To consider
I said before that these were some of the “Classic Microformats”. That is because this standard is actually fairly old. It being old might be a good thing, as there has been a lot of time for it to be integrated into search engines and bots.
There is a newer version, microformats2, and there are other formats/methods out there for adding structured data to your site, like JSON-LD or Schema.org. You should consider if this is the right format for you.
Another thing to consider is if we would even need these formats in the future with the rise of AI technology.
Not knowing a huge amount about web crawlers at this stage, but painfully aware of the dizzying heights which AI and technology is aiming for, I hypothesise that the technology we have in place scraping the internet for all the data it can find, is probably doing a really good job without the need for microformats.
The possibility that AI technology will make parsing unstructured data easier and thus decrease the need for these formats is very interesting to think about, but there might always be a place for some form of formatting. Who really knows.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully you know a little bit more about microformats now than when you first started this short presentation. I am still learning about microformats myself, and hopefully this has encouraged you to look into these sorts of formats for yourself, they do seem quite useful.
Trying to wrap your head around all the little specifics can be a little tedious, but you'll get it with practice. Or maybe one of the other format solutions suit you better, there is no one proper solution.
I hope we can see some newer generators that produce semantically correct microformats in the future, I believe all the current ones and just outdated. Web technologies have improved rapidly in recent years and a lot of online tools and validators haven't caught up yet.