posts tagged with microformats

2008 Dec 12th 08:31pm

Use it and Improve it!

This Tumblr theme implements the hatom microformat. The code for this theme is hosted on github here. Please feel free to add to and improve upon the code in any way you can.

The complete source ready to copy straight into your Tumblr customize page can be found here.

See the README file for further instructions.

12:04pm

Just what are Microformats anyway?

Microformats are a set of open standards and specifications for the construction of (X)HTML that is meaningful to both humans and machines.

Definition from the microformats wiki:

Microformats enable the publishing of higher fidelity information on the Web, providing the fastest and simplest way to support feeds and APIs for your website.

See more explanations of what microformats are, and what you can do with them.

10:45am

Why Microformats?

  • Developer1: Now we've all separated style from content, wouldn't it be great if everyone used a standard structure and set of class names in their markup?
  • Developer2: Great idea! That will save me having to invent new ones. Let's also make those class names as semantically meaningful as possible.
  • Developer1: Good thinking! This will make our code instantly meaningful to other people.
  • Developer2: Absolutely, and all these standardised, semantic class names will also make our content more accessible to machines!
  • Developer1: What shall we call this set of standards?
  • Developer2: How about microformats?
  • Developer1: Perfect!
  • Developer2: What should we do when there's no existing microformat for the particular kind of element we are marking up?
  • Developer1: In such cases I think we should use Plain Old Semantic HTML.
  • Developer2: Ah, you mean just use a class name that's as semantically meaningful as possible?
  • Developer1: Exactly! Rather POSH don't you think?
  • Developer2: Ha! This is so cool! So many benefits with no extra effort!
2008 Dec 11th 02:08pm

Extracting meaningful content from hAtom formatted markup

Thanks to the hAtom format, the content of tumblogs using this theme can be extracted programatically directly from the XHTML. There are some limitations due to the way tumblr publishes audio and video content. I would have liked to have implemented the hAudio format for audio posts but this is not currently feasible.

Here are some links to hAtom to Atom transformers that do a great job of extracting this hAtom formatted content:

Also well worth trying out are these two addons for Mozilla Firefox that help you locate and extract microformats while you browse:

11:48am

Steve Ganz, senior Web developer at LinkedIn, talks about how they republished 9 million public profiles using hResume.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

microformats rss

A microformats theme for tumblr by
James Tindallmy avatar