Comments on: Have Microformats finally arrived?

By: Andy Mabbett

Andy Mabbett — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 14:26:54 +0000

Unfortunately, Google Maps’ deployment of microformat is seriously broken. The few that are not invalid contain junk data.

They are aware of this.

By: malikyte

malikyte — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 14:39:10 +0000

At the moment, Operator and Tails both show noticeable slowdowns on page loads for me, so I have it disabled unless I’m testing whether or not my sites have proper Microformat code. Until it becomes part of the browser(s) and therefore doesn’t force a secondary traversal of the DOM with slower scripting, I don’t think it will become very mainstream. However, for services that may have webcrawlers, such as Google, Yahoo, and others, it’s still useful and it’s the only reason (other than early adoption of something with a huge backing) I’ve been incorporating it.

So…it’s still worthwhile, but not much to the first party (site visitors), only through third-parties.

By: keviin6

keviin6 — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 06:20:54 +0000

why is that, Tail FF ext doesnt show up any MF in sitepoint contact page?

By: Dylanfm

Dylanfm — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 23:12:38 +0000

Don’t forget, you can separate a class attribute’s values by spaces ie. class=”url fn yadda”.

By: Carl Edwards

Carl Edwards — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 20:38:08 +0000

MapQuest had hCard support last year.

By: Sorccu

Sorccu — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 17:46:18 +0000

The benefit isn’t just in being “MF enabled”, you get a standard set of CSS classes to use in styling, too :)

By: Richard Conyard

Richard Conyard — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 14:22:19 +0000

@Django:

Why not use class though, after all the use of class here is pretty much what the class attribute is there for (that class is just available for CSS is a common misapprehension). Also I can’t see how / where use of class would interrupt existing functionality by design (I do appreciate that there may be specific instances on a site where the class selector in the microformat may be used by a sites CSS).

The trouble with having custom microformat attributes is to do this correctly would involve adding another namespace in XHTML or not using valid HTML; in each instance it involves adding something new for the sakes of adding something new when there are perfectly valid methods available.

By: Django

Django — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 14:04:06 +0000

I’m still underwhelmed by microformats, mostly because of some of the design decisions that they decided when specifying the technical details. For instance, why did they choose to use the CLASS attribute to identify the pieces of data? Why not use another microformat specific attribute that wouldn’t interrupt existing functionality (and that browsers would just ignore if they didn’t recognize it)? As it is, if you want to embed microformats into existing pages of content that already have a class defined on the data objects, then you have to re-work the styling of your page just to accommodate a data identifier that isn’t even visible to the user. Using CLASS seems shortsighted when the attribute clearly already has a display use within the DOM.

By: Richard Conyard

Richard Conyard — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 09:53:07 +0000

These developments are all good, and Microformats are great; but I still can’t get away from the feeling that XMDP is a bit like building on sand, and optimisations will cause more long term hassle than good.

By: arkinstall

arkinstall — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 08:51:27 +0000

I have to admit, I felt exactly the same until I read this. Sure, microformats can be read… but who cares?

Now, I feel quite the opposite. If companies like Google and Yahoo are utilising the MicroFormats, then what am I waiting for? I’m going to use them! It actually makes me wonder why these things have taken so long to get on the web.