First, the biggest. IE8 has been released in initial beta. The release was also included a general overview of IE8’s new features and fixes. It’s actually quite a lot of information to absorb all at once. I’ve skimmed a number of the IE8 whitepapers, and feel the biggest changes are W3C’s WIA-ARIA support, Acid2 compliance, the javascript selectors api, and their assertion of achieving CSS 2.1 compliance. Of course, the devil is in the details, and there is no company for which that statement is more true. They have a lot of work ahead, and we know they talk a good game. The big upside, however, is that they are actually talking about it. Out in the open. Big step, and I applaud them for that.

The other biggest buzz of the day was from Yahoo, in announcing the beta of their Fire Eagle service, an API for broadcasting your physical location to the web. I wouldn’t call it earth-shattering, but I think that there’s a good chance a number of cool things are built with it. Watch the video of it’s introduction, and then take a look here to quickly get an idea of the details. It would appear from the details that it was written in a highly usable way.

Of more direct importance to me, Google has announced their Contacts API. I despise when sites ask me to enter my username/password for other sites. The most offensive request is for Gmail. I don’t have any interesting emails, let me tell you… but I certainly don’t want to let others read them. The Contacts API is a safe way for distribution and use of your Gmail contacts, without threatening the security of your Gmail account or your other Google-stored information. With this, I should be able to sync my Gmail contacts with my desktop mail contacts. I’m very happy about that.

Heading up the long-since-overdue category, AOL has announced they’ve opened their Instant Messenger Protocol, OpenAIM. Finally. I remember ages ago when… well, it’s all in the past now. That’s one big wall that has been broken down between protocols, and hopefully Yahoo and Microsoft will fall in line. It will be great if other apps can finally use the features that have been limited to the AIM client for all this time. I use Adium and Pidgin most of the time (Adium, I believe uses Pidgin’s core), and look forward to seeing what they do with the new open protocol. (On a personal note, hopefully this doesn’t spell any negative news for my friends who work on AIM.)

And to round things off, here’s two smaller releases today (one based on IE8’s Activities):

• The Firefox Operator plugin (for Microformats) has already given a go at implementing Activities, which were announced at today’s IE8 overview.
• The New York Times has contributed a perl module to CPAN. Looks like a useful profiling tool, especially since it profiles line-by-line.

The Magical Minimalism of Microformat – The New York Times tipping their hat to Microformats

Internet Explorer 8 – Please don’t be lying, please don’t be lying, please don’t be lying…

Email Standards Project – Please turn out to be relevant

Odiogo – Convert RSS feeds to podcasts. I rarely ever listen to podcasts [ok, fine, I never listen to them], but I still like the idea.

What and How

Very simply, Microformats give our already semantic xhtml elements an extra layer of meaning when using a common set of attribute values. Consider the case of an “hCalendar”, a microformat that gives xhtml the structure of an events calendar. An events calendar is simply a set of events. This relationship is easily described by a parent-children relationship. The problem is that xhtml can easily describe parent-children relationships, yet it cannot semantically describe this calendar-events relationship. Microformats do just that… they provide a way to describe this common relationship through the use of attribute values.

To create an “hCalendar”, you would write something like the following:

<div class=”vcalendar”>

<span class=”vevent”/>
<div class=”vevent”/>
<dl class=”vevent”/>

</div>

As you can see, the supplementary calendar-events structure is added by setting specific attribute values, in this case ‘vcalendar’ and ‘vevent’. Microformats use exiting attributes like ‘class’ and ‘rel’ as hooks for this structure, in the same way these attributes can be used as hooks for additional CSS information. Additionally, these attributes can be applied to whichever element you choose*. I demonstrated the use of the same attribute/value pair (class=”vevent”) on the ‘span’, ‘div’, and ‘dl’ elements in the example above.

[* The rules for applying attributes to elements are the same as the existing xhtml spec]

Why you should use them

While I foresee a wide array of future uses for Microformats, there are limited practical applications today. That being said, the small number does not mean they have limited value; their use can provide substantial value. For example: later this week I am going to re-write the concert-listing page for my youth orchestra website. I am going to use the hCalendar Microformat to code this season’s events. I will then use an open-source converter to allow users to download a iCal file of this calendar on the fly.

Why would I do this? Because it’s advantageous. Using the hCalendar Microformat I can…

• provide an additional interface (the iCal file) to my users for free.
• syndicate these events. That way, if I ping a Microformat aware service (like pingerati.net) I will have published these events elsewhere, without any additional work.
• maintain only one source file for multiple outputs (in this case, html, iCal file, and syndicated content)
• use my current knowledge of html as a base for the syntax, requiring me only to learn the Microformats terms and schema before I start using them

There are similar uses for the other Microformats, including hCard (contact info), geo and adr (location/address), XFN (relationships between people), and so on. I invite you to take a look at the book or the Microformats website for more information.

I hope that’s enough to convince you that Microformats are a valid and useful technology. One of the more compelling aspects is the way Microformats are created, yet I think that is interesting enough to warrant it’s own post (look for it later). Hope someone out there finds this useful.