Tutorials on Microformats Making Web Content Smarter

You can download the tutorials , including all the examples and lab exercises (zip file, about 13MB).

To move forward in the slide show click on the right arrow key. To move backward, click on the left arrow key. Here are other ways to navigate the tutorials

The tutorials are HTML documents. But they appear as slide shows. I am using S5 for this.

Introduction

Microformats are used to make Web documents smarter (HTML, XHTML, RSS, ATOM, BLOGS, XML). They don't affect how your documents are rendered by a browser. But they have a huge (positive) impact on the ability of Web applications/tools to collect, understand, and process the information in your Web pages.

Microformats are tiny bits of information injected into Web pages. When you add together the tiny bits of information over thousands or millions of Web pages, you have a mountain of valuable information that can help with searching, understanding, and processing the Web.

There is a growing collection of Microformats. I have created tutorials on the core Microformats (as of early 2007).

The Microformat Process

Microformats are created using the scientific method: research what Nature (i.e., the Web community) is doing, understand it, and formulate a model of it (i.e., a Microformat). It's a very exciting process: http://microformats.org/wiki/process. Also see Why Examples First

This is a nice, short summary of the scientific process: Science Asks Three Basic Questions