Jeremy Keith: Mashing up microformats
Jeremy has a nice post on how you can intermix microformats, rather than creating new ones or extending existing ones. For example, rather than adding a "date of death" field to hCard, why not mark something up as both an hCard and an hCalendar event -- the hCard comtains all the person details, and the event (the person's life) has a start an end date. No need for a "date of death" field. Jeremy's got other smart examples, too. Because I sometimes I get asked about my feelings on microformats (people have noticed that I don't ever really talk about them), here they are: Microformats are a very good idea, and they can do no harm. They're just regular, semantic HTML, so implementing them is easy and non-controversial in my mind. However, I don't feel like they *currently* add much value, because there are so few useful tools for consuming them. Yes, I know there are Firefox extensions and such -- but where are the microformat tools that are going to benefit my Mom or my Grandma? Also, I sometimes wonder why one wouldn't simply add a read-only REST API to their site, instead of encoding everything in microformats. It seems simpler and less fragile to me. So, bottom line: I haven't gotten into microformats much myself. Not because I don't think they're a good idea. In theory, they are. But more because I haven't seen a lot of real-world benefit to taking the time -- yet. The flip side is that the time I would have to take is pretty minimal, and implementing them on my sites could do no harm (even if I don't think it would do much good, either).
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