Mini-review & Competition Microformats - Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 - Reviews - Articles

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Microformats burst onto the scene a couple of years ago and are fast becoming an essential tool for all professional web designers and developers. Imagine being able to integrate all of your web-based contact details, tagged articles, and geographical information seamlessly in web and desktop applications, without having to add anything extra to your websites except a little specialized HTML markup. Microformats provide a more formalized technology for adding commonly used semantics (such as contact details, location, and reviews) to today's Web. Unlike XML or the semantic Web, microformats use ubiquitous technologies like HTML and XHTML, existing developer skills, and current web tools, and, perhaps most important, they work in all of today's web browsers. This book is a comprehensive guide to microformats. It explores why, in Bill Gates's words, "We need microformats"; how microformats work; and the kinds of problems microformats help solve. the book covers every current microformat, with complete details of the syntax, semantics, and uses of each, along with real-world examples and a comprehensive survey of the tools available for working with them. the book also features case studies detailing how major web content publishers such as yahoo put microformats to work in their web applications. Written by one of the Web's best-known educators, John Allsopp, Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 will help you painlessly get up to speed with this exciting technology.

Overview

In this book you'll learn

How to take best advantage of the built-in semantics of XHTML and HTML
How to extend the semantics of HTML using microformats and open up a world of new possibilities with web applications
Every aspect of all the common microformats currently in use
How microformats help your websites and applications easily integrate with web applications like Google Maps, as well as desktop applications like iCal, outlook, and entourage
What innovative publishers and services, big and small, are doing right now with microformats

Summary of Contents

PART ONE: INTRODUCING MICROFORMATS
- Chapter 1: What Are Microformats?
- Chapter 2: The State of the Art in Microformats
PART TWO: USING MICROFORMATS
- Chapter 3: Structural and Semantic HTML
- Chapter 4: Link-Based Microformats: rel-license, rel-tag rel-nofollow, and VoteLinks
- Chapter 5:Microformat to Describe Relationships Between People: XFN
- Chapter 6: Location Microformats: geo and adr
- Chapter 7: Contact Information Microformat: hCard
- Chapter 8: Event Microformat: hCalendar
- Chapter 9: Review and Resume Microformats: hReview and hResume
- Chapter 10: Syndicated Content Microformat: hAtom.
PART THREE: CASE STUDIES
- Chapter 11: Case Study: Cork'd
- Chapter 12: Case Study: Yahoo
PART FOUR: DEVELOPING MICROFORMATS
- Chapter 13: The Process of Developing Microformats
PART FIVE: APPENDIXES
- Appendix A: Microformat Specification Reference
- Appendix B: Microformat Design Patterns
- Appendix C: People, Tools, Services, and Publishers

Who is this book for?

This book is an essential tool for all professional web designers and developers interested in microformats: integrated web-based contact details, tagged articles, geographical information seamlessly in web and desktop applications, etc.

Conclusion

Microformats - Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 is one of the few books that actually give the why and reasoning behind various technologies. It is an incredible resource for learning Microformats, very in-depth from cover to cover. Microformats are still in their infancy, being just a few years old. However, as shown throughout this book there are many big players who are staking ground in the value and use of Microformats.

In a nutshell, in addition to using class information on an HTML tag as a means of using CSS for presentation, you can also use it for conveying information. Microformats are well thought out nested elements that provide human readable text, but machine processable content. The idea is fairly trivial, which is why it works so well.

Turns out there are all kinds of wonderful applications, and this book walks you through the problem that's being solved, shows why the solution is elegant, gives you plenty of examples, and then demonstrates how to not just create, but to detect and read Microformats.

As an added bonus, the book touches on all kinds of little developer tools, tricks, and browser extensions that just are plain usable.

In short, the book over delivers without being verbose. The author does a great job of explaining theory, use and then providing use examples for the various formats, showing css concepts for styling the information even if on first glance it seemed a bit off topic.

We consider this book The Official Guide To Microformats with all of the information available worthy of reading. This book is great to read, and will continue to be used as a great resource.

Competition

We've got a brand new mini-review and competition of Microformats - Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0. The friendly people of friends of ED are giving away 5 books!

All you need to do, to enter the competition is, download the sample PDF and finish the following sentence:

"In geo, the root element contains two properties, each of them HTML elements:..."

Send your answer to this e-mail address, before Wednesday the 26th of March 2008. Don't forget to include your post address and phone number (required for international shipping) in the e-mail.