Do you use microformats in your web projects? [closed]

Question

Do you use microformats in your web projects?

If yes then why? If no then why?

If yes then for which things do you use?

Is there any alternate of microformats in HTML 5 ?

I haven't used microformats yet. Should i start to use now or not much need?

Answer 1

I’ve used microformats fairly extensively. The benefits I see are

• access to data for robots like Google Rich Snippets
• access to data for users via µF-comsuming tools like H2VX
• (some) data validation
• more meaningful markup, which makes me happy

(minor) disadvantages are

• time; hand-coding these things can be a pita. Either add programmatically (e.g. generate from data in CMS) or make a bunch of snippets. If doing via a CMS then it’s (for me) a no-brainer
• require extra attention to UI to do well (best if exposed, but that often involves custom icon etc)

Microformats work fine as-is in HTML5. There are new HTML5 elements that map well to some µF functions, notably <time>, but be warned that current µF tools generally can’t cope with HTML5’s new elements (“Tool support” slide).

Your other alternatives are HTML5’s microdata, and RDFa. Microdata is pretty nice, but quite new so doesn’t have many tools available. You can represent microformats in microdata, and the HTML5 spec has microdata versions of vCard and vCal. There’s also HTML5’s data- attribute, but that’s for private use and doesn’t encode visible data, so is probably not what you’re after.

I perceive these three as a continuum from easy but specific (microformats) to hard but capable of anything (RDFa), with microdata (for me) occupying a sweet spot in the middle. Google Rich Snippets can read data in any of these, but user tools are still playing catchup. The main benefit of any of these is making your content more usable by exposing more of the information, and for me that’s generally worth the time.

For completeness I’ve used

• hCard
• hCalendar
• hEvent
• hAtom
• hReview (once? :)
• XFN
• plus some rels like rel-license

EDIT: I’ve written these articles on HTML5Doctor with everything you need to know ;)

• Extending HTML — Microformats
• Extending HTML — Microdata

HTH

Answer 2

You should ask Jeff Atwood.