The Progress and the Promise of Microformats

In The Progress and the Promise of Microformats, Tantek Çelik and Rohit Khare explore the hot topic of microformats—what they are, why they’re important, and who is using them today. The article does a good job of explaining how microformats can—and are—impacting the way we create, manage, and reuse information today on the web. “Once we get to the point of that kind of copy-and-paste, publish-and-subscribe model that users can use with a couple of clicks here and there, that’s going to be when we know that we’ve really connected with users, when anybody can just use the stuff and not have to worry about calling them microformats anymore”, they say.  “Your typical blogger doesn’t worry about the fact that they’re typing in HTML—because they’re not, they’re just typing into a form field. It just works. We want the same simplicity of publishing so individuals can create their own structured information and can share it with each other.”