Yahoo’s YQL query language, a SQL-style query language for the web, now supports microformat queries. A given example is finding the address for an event on Upcoming (a Yahoo service), not using the Upcoming API, but using a YQL query to retrieve a vCard microformat in either XML or JSON, using a REST call. But it’s not limited to Yahoo services only! It works on any website with microformats, like, lets say “halans.com”, where my about page contains a vcard. Result: http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20adjunct.item.type%20from%20microformats%20where%20url%3D%27http%3A%2F%2Fwww.halans.com%2Fabout%2Fprofessionally%2F%27%20&format=xml

As Chris Heilman writes over at the Yahoo! Developer Network Blog:

“This will hopefully make it much easier for people to write software that consumes microformats and maybe bring the “chicken” of adding microformats and the egg of finding good uses for them a bit closer together.”

You could now use Yahoo SearchMonkey to find microformats around the web (example searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.page.uf.hcard or “searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.page.uf.geo halans“) and then query the microformats inside the SearchMonkey results with YQL.

Category: Microformats, Semantic Web

Author: JJ Halans

Tags: Chris Heilman, Yahoo!

Over at SitePoint, Meitar Moscovitz writes about “A Little-known Way to Replace Some Scripts with CSS Counters“, a great example on using CSS and a page’s markup as an API:

… this is a powerful demonstration of how you can use your markup as an API to let the advancing capabilities of CSS do things you could once only do with client- or server-side scripting. Now that’s exciting.

I have an idea of where I could easily add some additional info, in stead of reverting to JavaScript, some inspiration for Mapanui v1.3. Thanks!

Category: Microformats, Semantic Web

Author: JJ Halans

Google had some interesting, newsworthy developments last week:

• ReadWriteWeb points out triples in Google’s search results, an interesting SemWeb development at Google Search;
• Google helps Data Portability move forward with some open source python scripts, with the Google Blog Converter for AppEngine: “Converters to/from various blog formats hosted on Google App Engine.”;
• A new Google research paper warns us about social networks spilling our secrets when merging social graphs.

Category: Semantic Web

Author: JJ Halans

John Allsopp writes about the need for mechanisms in HTML that clearly and unambiguously enable developers to add richer, more meaningful semantics, beyond pseudo semantics like microformats, and HTML 5′s new elements which are not backwards compatible. Check out the article and its comments over at A List Apart.

Category: Semantic Web

Author: JJ Halans