Today’s post is about RDFa and Microformats
with a bit about HTML5 thrown in. Let’s be brutal
Microformats, HTML5 and RDFa are never going to be sexy.
These are ways of structuring information on the web so that
computers can make sense of it. Microformats are like glue
that sticks websites together. Stop snoring at the back.
Let’s take a step back to where we are
now. Web pages are made from HTML and display
information. One web page might hold information about an
event run by a government department and another might be a news
item about the
Computer Engineer Barbie (opens new window). A computer
can make some sense of the pages, enough to list them in a search
engine. However it is going to struggle to make sense of the
content of the page. Pulling lots of unstructured information
from a variety of websites together so it can be used in some sort
of sensible way would be a lot of hard work.
Now HTML5 will add some semantic replacements
for existing bits of HTML. A computer struggles to separate
out those parts of a page which were headers, footers, navigation
and article because they weren’t identified clearly in a page’s
HTML. HTML5 will allow a clearer separation of different bits
of a page so computers can make more sense of them. However
this only allows a computer a vague idea of the scaffolding not the
finer detail.
What RDFa and Microformats do is add finer
structure to the information in a page so a computer can read
it. That means an address can be structured so a search
engine can understand it and let searchers find the web page when
they are looking for information about a particular area. A
product can be set up so it can be listed in specialist
searches. Events from the websites of different organisations
in a city can be pulled together into a central site to promote
them without anyone having to do anything. News and reviews
about Computer Engineer Barbie can be shared with news
sites.
That’s why, while Microformats (opens new
window), HTML5 (opens new
window) and RDFa (opens new
window) are never going to be sexy, they are going to be
useful. They will be the new glue of the World Wide
Web. Once we’ve done the hard work of setting up a website so
it uses the appropriate structure other, good, things can happen
without our having to do anything else.