Origa.me

Aaah ... breaking the silence.

Has it really been 10 weeks since my last post? Here's one for the web designers out there. If you haven't heard of Microformats then check them out. They effectively allow you to embed structured data (such as contact details, events, geo data, etc.) into a standard web page in a way which can be read by humans as normal, but using an agreed format based on common established standards (such as vcard and icalendar) to allow machines to recognise and process the data.

Perhaps an example:

My company's contact page at http://pdl.uk.com/contact/ displays as normal.

Lurking under the surface, however, are Microformat compliant tags which my browser plugin recognises, as shown in this screen shot (contact & geo data available):

So, when I click on "Passenger Design Ltd.", the whole contact card gets added to my system's address book (or online address book or whatever I use). No copying and pasting; no re-typing. Really easy. Same with geo data except it takes me straight to Google Maps or whatever service I decide to use.

The really nice bit about Microformats is that they don't define what tool you use to handle the data and the tool you use to handle the data doesn't define how the data is stored. So I can start using Yahoo maps rather than Google maps without having to alter my web page.

I'm still at the experimental stage with these so implementation is ongoing and lessons are being learned. I recommend you have a good look too.