Microformats

So over the weekend I’ve been doing some work for a portal site looking at their infrastructure and experience and refreshing it a touch.

I spent some time this week looking at how we can incorporate new social aspects into it, and one of the things that strikes immediately is the potential for using microformats.

For anyone not familiar with them, microformats are essentially semantic markups for regular html(like adding additional css classes or rel attributes to links). Then users with microformat-enabled applications can leverage that to new (awesome) functionality. There even exists a format for social network contacts called XFN. Tomorrow I’m going to post about the benefits of the format.

Update 12/25/2007:

I feel bad I never got around to writing about XFN so here is a great link to a description of XFN and how it differs from FOAF.