Today I was at a meeting regarding migrating a site to a new web solution. Part of the new solution is the support for microformats. I must honestly admit that I had never heard of it before, and was caught with a little bit surprise.

A microformat is an open source data format built upon existing and widely adopted frameworks like XML. The format is highly modular and microformat tags may be placed within existing HTML-based Web pages. These tags then allow crawlers to find and extract microformatted information. Examples include contact information, event details or calendars, and maps.

If you are a Firefox user please install the add-on Operator (a microformat detection extension developed by Michael Kaply at IBM), and then visit the following URL: http://www.iss.uio.no/disputaser:

microformats-events

A great example of using maps with Microformats, is the front page of the ESOP project, URL: http://www.esop.uio.no/.

microformats-maps

So what browsers support Microformats today? As already mentioned Firefox 2.x supports the format through the use of an add-on, and it was supposed to be included in v3.x. As far as I have understood, there also excists add-ons for Internet Explorer 6 and 7, but I have not found any place to download it (a comment or two would be appreciated). Internet Explorer 8 will have Microformats support implemented, and according to Chris Wilson, the new platform architect for IE:

“Mash-ups will continue to drive innovation. Componentization and semantic tagging of data will be supported,” Wilson told the Ajax Experience crowd. Wilson touted the harnessing of microformats, like Microsoft has done with its Live Clipboard effort, as “real world stuff” that will “make the Web much more usable.”

“Microformats add meaning to content in HTML,” Wilson said.

Safari for MacOS X 10.5 has a nice plugin, but Opera currently doesn’t seem to have support, but my.opera.com is already enhanced with such functionality.

An interesting article about how to use Microformats in WordPress blogs can be found at blogHelper.