Microformats: Why?
Well, from “satanic cats”:http://www.thudfactor.com/wordpress/2006/09/21/no-cats-for-christians/ to deep tech.
Thudfactor implements “hAtom”:http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom, mostly thanks to the “Sandbox”:http://www.plaintxt.org/themes/sandbox/ wordpress theme I used to make it. Styling a site is so much simpler when you have a good markup base, so if you’re the kind of person who likes to do his or her own designs and you use Wordpress Sandbox is definately the way to go.
Anyway, as I said: Sandbox implements hAtom, which is a “microformat”:http://www.microformats.org/. What is a microformat, you ask? And well you may, I’m still trying to figure that out myself. The “about microformats page”:http://microformats.org/about/ is about the most unhelpful document I’ve read describing an idea so many people seem excited about. I started the page at “huh?” (which is why you have an about page) but finished it with “whut?”
The very definition of unhelpful.
Anyway, I (kind of) get microformats now — it’s a way of using markup in a standardized way across websites to describe content. This is what XML (with a published DTD) is supposed to do, of course[1], but no one is serving web pages in XML because no one _eats_ web pages in XML.
fn1. “Of course,” say the non-techies.
My question is: what eats microformats? A quick look through the Wiki shows dozens of microformats and sites that publish using microformats, but the number of web services that actually take advantage seems depressingly low. Where’s the payoff for marking up my code like this? What’s the point?
