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Tiny Tags Power the Semantic Web
Yesterday's promise of the semantic web remains largely unfulfilled -- machines still aren't very good at understanding the code they're rendering. Microformats want to change that and the next version of Firefox aims to lead the way.
Alex Faaborg believes microformats are next leap in the evolution of hypertext. Unlike the web we know today where a contact link automatically opens your mail client, microformat data has no predetermined association. In the third stage says Faabord, "the user has control over the associations." Which should music to the ears of webmail users tired of accidentally opening an email client they don't use.
<a href="http://microformats.org/">Microformats</a> are tiny pieces of code which add contextual meaning to HTML tags. They give browsers and other web software tools easy signposts to help understand what data is being read and rendered.
Specific pieces of web content like dates, addresses, product reviews and resumes can be tagged with simple microformat codes. For instance, whenever an author places an event listing on a web page, he can append it with the appropriate piece of code. For every phone number or street address, the microformatted code can tell the browser, "this is somebody's contact information."
Tantek Çelik, CTO of Technorati and creator of microformats, describes their purpose as a way of "making web pages both more useful and more usable to the average person." Currently to use microformats you'd need to know HTML, but Firefox 3 is hoping to change that.
Alex Faaborg of the Firefox team believes that the browser should be responsible for parsing microformated content, "then the user won't have to worry about microformats."
Çelik agrees and says the future of microformats lies with browsers. "I think it is an essential step -- it makes it much easier for both users and content/site publishers."
While microformats are easy for HTML authors to use, for the average web user microformats remain a an untapped mystery. The developers behind Firefox would like microformats to become as familiar as RSS.
"If the browser provides a consistent way of displaying microformatted content, then the user doesn't have to worry about a chaotic UI where every type of information is displayed differently," Faaborg says.
The Firefox 3 developers have not settled on an implementation yet, but they are committed to including them in the popular browser.
According to Faaborg, "we are still figuring out how we are going to allocate developer resources, and if we will need to rely on open source contributers for some parts of the microformat detection implementation."
For now Mozilla is watching two extensions for Firefox evolve: <a href-"https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4106">Operator</a.> by Michael Kaply and <a href="http://webcards.whymicroformats.com/">WebCards</a> by Andy Mitchell. But Mozilla would like to eventually role microformats support into the browser.
One idea Faaborg has proposed is to include a toolbar icon to notify users when a page contains microformatted data. Still he believes that "it would be considerably easier for users to apply actions to microformatted content (like adding an event to their calendar) if they could directly click on the information, instead of finding it in a menu in the browser UI."
Faaborg has blogged extensively about microformats and found his favorite idea in user comments on his site. Two users suggested changing the mouse cursor to show the associated application when you hover over a piece of microformatted content.
"So if you moved the mouse over an address, a small icon for Google Earth (or Yahoo maps, or what ever application you choose to associate with addresses) would appear to the side of the mouse cursor."
Clicking the link would then take you to whatever page or program you decide to associate with that type of data. Addresses lead to your favorite mapping service, event listings to your online calendar and so on.
But Faaborg doesn't think Firefox should stop at detecting and handling microformats, he's like to see creation tools as well. "If it takes 30 seconds to put information in the right structure to add it to a calendar, then the single person who created the information should spend that 30 seconds, not each of the 100 or 1000 people who want to add the information to their various different calendar applications."
Faaborg thinks that if the browser takes care of the full life cycle of structured information, from creating it to detecting it, "we could improve the functionality of the web by simply releasing a new version of Firefox."
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