microformats are extensions to HTML for marking up people, events, blog posts, reviews, recipes etc.
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Introduction
This wiki is the central resource of the microformats community and provides microformats authoring guides, references, specifications, drafts, publishing patterns, research, brainstorming, and issue tracking.
Get Started
Get started with microformats:
- First, make sure your pages and applications use semantically rich, descriptive, ‘POSH’ HTML.
- Mark-up your contact information with hCard (authoring tips, examples) and link from your personal site to your other profiles with rel-me.
- Have questions? Read the frequently asked questions, join the IRC channel and ask questions.
- Want to learn more in person? Check out microformats events.
Definition
Microformats are small patterns of HTML to represent commonly published things like people, events, blog posts, reviews and tags in web pages.
Microformats are the fastest and simplest way to provide an API to the data and information in your website. See what else you can do with microformats.
How to contribute
Want to join in and contribute?
- Get started by adding microformats to your website, services, and products
- Advocate the use of microformats on other web sites, especially those you use
- Read how-to-play before editing this wiki
- Join the IRC Channel and mailing lists to learn and help answer questions (read general guidelines before posting).
- Write a testimonial
- Do something on the to do list.
- Translate this microformats wiki into other languages to make microformats more accessible to readers of languages around the world.
- Before proposing any new microformats, make sure your website is POSH, uses existing microformats, and then read the process.
This wiki has a number of enhancements to assist development and contributions to microformats. Before you start editing, see the wiki introduction page for instructions.
Specifications
The list of current, stable Microformats open standard specifications.
- hCalendar - hCalendar creator
- hCard - hCard creator
- rel-license
- rel-nofollow
- rel-tag
- VoteLinks
- XFN - XFN creator
- XMDP
- XOXO
Drafts
Drafts are newer microformats, which are still making their way through the process to become specifications. Implementers should be prepared to keep abreast of future developments and changes. Please watch the wiki pages for updates.
- adr - for marking up address information
- geo - for marking up WGS84 geographic coordinates (latitude; longitude)
- hAtom - syndicating episodic content (e.g. weblog postings)
- hAudio
- hListing - open, distributed listings
- hMedia - A single media publishing format that relates to Images, Video and Audio.
- hNews
- hProduct
- hRecipe - for cooking+baking recipes
- hResume - for publishing resumes and CVs
- hReview - hReview creator
- rel-directory - to indicate that the destination of a hyperlink is a directory listing containing an entry for the current page
- rel-enclosure - for indicating attachments (e.g. files) to download and cache
- rel-home - indicate a hyperlink to the homepage of the site
- rel-payment - indicate a payment mechanism
- robots exclusion
If you're tempted to try your hand at writing a microformat please read the process page first!
Exploratory Discussions
New: microformats 2 has sufficiently stabilized to start using on public web pages and developing parsers and applications.
See: exploratory-discussions for details of research and analysis of real-world examples, existing formats, and brainstorming of possible new microformats, per the microformats process.
Design Patterns
Design patterns are common uses of markup across microformats.
- abbr-design-pattern
- class-design-pattern
- date-design-pattern
- datetime-design-pattern
- include-pattern
- value-class-pattern new!
- rel-design-pattern
Examples
Resources
See resources.
User centric development
Shared work areas
Tools, test cases, additional research
The first place to look for examples, code, and test cases is in the pages for each individual microformat. There are only a few cross-cutting tools and services that need to process more than one microformat. That section is intended for editors, parsers, validators, test cases, and other information relevant across multiple microformats.
Microformats wiki translations
You may read and edit microformats articles in many other languages:
- languages with over 100 articles
- Français (French) mis à jour!
- languages with over 10 articles
- languages with over 2 articles
- languages just started
- پارسی (Farsi) new!
- العربية (Arabic)
- ภาษาไทย (Thai)
- Italiano (Italian) new!
- 한국어 (Korean) new!
- elsewhere
- Wikipedia's article on microformats has been translated into a number of languages.
See also other-languages, and how-to-start-a-new-translation.