
Ask HN: Microformats - Still useful? - po
What happened to microformats? I was looking for a standard set of database models to use for contact info, addresses, etc… and I ran across them again.<p>http://microformats.org/<p>Their website is still there but it looks pretty quiet: Maybe a news blurb every few months or so. A few of the OSS projects I see implementing them are quiet since right around 2008-2009 as well.<p>I used to hear about them from time to time. I think there was some chatter that Google Chrome would be detecting them and parsing them out of web pages. It always seemed like a decent idea that maybe missed its chance. Has anyone here put them into their site lately? Anyone have any insight into what happened?
======
infinity
Google has some informations on microformats for webmasters, it seems that
microformats, microdata and RDFa are used to generate extra information
displayed on search result pages:

\- About microformats
[http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...](http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=146897)

\- Rich snippets and structured markup
[http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=...](http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=21997)

------
byoung2
Google seems to be using them in search results, particularly with local
results (to show location info and ratings). Here is a good intro to microdata
and microformats: <http://diveintohtml5.org/extensibility.html>

~~~
kakaylor
Google will also detect hAtom for syndicated content:
<http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom>

------
arebop
See also [http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-
work/multipage/...](http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-
work/multipage/links.html#microdata)

------
Samuel_Michon
Mark Pilgrim wrote a good summary of all the options out there right now, and
Google's level of support for each of them:

<http://diveintohtml5.org/extensibility.html>

