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Dogster barks for Microformats… your web app should too
Dogster announced yesterday that they are now supporting hCard microformats. They are also working towards supporting hListing and hReview. Some comments from Ted (Dogster CEO:
- The beauty of Microformats is that they use HTML class assignments such that you can simply markup your existing code to indicate which are the significant fields.
- This is not going to change the world or even Dogster. In fact most users won’t even know about these additions in our source code, but it will mean that as search engines are developed to find just this type of structured data, our pages will be easily indexed and found.
I like his last statement. Sometimes we do things behind the scenes that users will never "get" but they will reap the rewards of. Will Microformats rein supreme in 2007? Probably not. But will they over time, heck yea.
So you might be asking, why did I choose to highlight this? Simple. As you create your web apps, think about Microformats from the beginning. Dogster had to tweak their code (and use time/money) after the fact, but if you do it from the beginning, there is almost no incremental cost but could be larger benefits. To learn more about Microformats, check out microformats.org.
Lastly, my hats off to everyone on the Microformat discussion group. It is amazing to watch the messages go back and forth and the time and effort people are putting into making this a success.
Microformats are a cool idea, but I think they’re doomed, and here’s why:
Without that “immediate reward”, there’s hardly a reason to use them. If a user will never notice, people have no more reason to put them into web apps than they do proper semantics.
There needs to be something for IE and FF that scans loaded pages for microformats and can make use of them before web apps will really start integrating them, imo.
Microformats offer immediate rewards to publishers. Huge ones.
Imagine you’re an e-commerce site, selling books. Other sites that scrape and index your site (Google, notably) have no ability to actually structure the data. They could TRY to derive the price (by looking for numeric content following the $, if it happens to be there). But they’d have a hard time understanding which text is the title, which is the author, which is the category of the book, etc.
Now, pretend that a specialized search engine (any shopping vertical site, for example) want to offer filtering capability by price. Or by category. Or by author. This gets REALLY easy if the scraped sites have microformats. Which makes their products more findable. Which means sales. Which creates revenue.
Anyone who has an interest in making their content more findable should consider microformats.
You also might consider the cost. Implementing microformats is absolutely trivial.
Jimmy,
there are already extensions for firefox/mozilla that do just this.
Check out tails, operator, webcards and tails export.
There are also user style sheets for highlighting microformats in any page you visit.
Both the IE and FF3 team have shown considerable interest in native microformat support in future versions.
So the instant gratfication thing is here, and coming to the mainstream,
john