MarkupAsAnApi » Microformats

Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool

halans — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 03:45:56 +0000

Finally, a big win for the Semantic Web. Google recognises the value of Microformats and RDFa for search results, especially for business contacts, personal information, product details and reviews.

Rich Snippet allows you to enhance your Google search results by marking up web pages with Microformats or RDFa.

Well, it had been known for a while, it’s just that now they provide their own testing tool, which is pretty cool, right?

Post from Jean-Jacques Halans MarkupAsAnApi blog.

Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool

Yahoo queries microformats

halans — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 22:05:58 +0000

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.

Post from Jean-Jacques Halans MarkupAsAnApi blog.

Yahoo queries microformats

CSS Counters

halans — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 02:24:49 +0000

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!

Post from Jean-Jacques Halans MarkupAsAnApi blog.

CSS Counters

Microformat tools

halans — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 20:35:30 +0000

Over at Sitepoint Meitar Moscovitz writes up “4 Easy-to-Use Microformat Tools to Beef Up Your Site” using minimal effort, including my favorite, Mapanui. ;-)

To get us in the Christmas spirit, over at 24 Ways, Elliot Jay Stocks shows us how to set up an Christmas hCard in “A Christmas hCard From Me To You“. If you’re looking for a simpler (non-chrismas-y) walk-through, revisit John Allsopp’s “Styling hCards with CSS” from 2006.

If you want to enable the Microsoft Oomph microformats framework in Firefox on any site supporting hCard/hCalendar, you can with Pascal’s Oomph Greasemonkey script. But take note of the notice though, the Microsoft hosted script can track your click stream…

Post from Jean-Jacques Halans MarkupAsAnApi blog.

Microformat tools

Mozilla Ubiquity 0.1

halans — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 11:37:37 +0000

Aza Raskin of Mozilla introduces a new experimental (alpha 0.1) project, called Ubiquity, a power user’s CLI extension for Firefox. It integrates Google Maps/Translate/Gmail, Twitter, Digg, Wikipedia, TinyURL,… and allows the user to mashup content himself, through a command line. It’s very similar to PodiPodi, Catalog/Devo extension, but being developed backed by the Mozilla community.

Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions.

Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs.

Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.

Extend the browser functionality easily.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Three minutes into the video, a demo of Craigslist and mapping a number of rental unit addresses, and the note that this would take advantage of microformatted data, exactly like my own little project, Mapanui.

You can extend Ubiquity by writing your own commands (and share them with the world), using JavaScript. Ubiquity also uses the fab jQuery library (obviously) for rapid JavaScript development (though not using $ but jQuery for compatibility).

A nice push for microformats and an Open Web.

Something to keep an eye on, and look forward to full Firefox 4 integretion.

Post from Jean-Jacques Halans MarkupAsAnApi blog.

Mozilla Ubiquity 0.1

Yahoo SearchMonkey Apps online

halans — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 12:54:29 +0000

Yahoo earlier (in March) proclaimed to embrace the Semantic web:

LinkedIn is to mark up user profile pages with microformats. Yahoo search could then understand the content and relationships between pieces of content and present that data in an intelligent way in Yahoo search.

Last week then Yahoo introduced a number of changes to its default search experience to add more structured data to results using SearchMonkey widgets.

Yahoo SearchMonkey is a key part of Yahoo’s attempts to embrace the semantic web and open standards in general.

Post from Jean-Jacques Halans MarkupAsAnApi blog.

Yahoo SearchMonkey Apps online

On why the BBC removed the hCalendar microformat

halans — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 02:40:17 +0000

“Why the BBC removed microformat DateTime patterns from bbc.co.uk and what we are doing to bring them back.”

Post from Jean-Jacques Halans MarkupAsAnApi blog.

On why the BBC removed the hCalendar microformat

On Portable Social Networks

halans — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 11:21:49 +0000

Ben Ward from Yahoo! Brickhouse writes about Portable Social Networks over at Digital Web Magazine.

It talks about Identity, Personality and Profile, using Microformats like XFN and hCard.

Post from Jean-Jacques Halans MarkupAsAnApi blog.

On Portable Social Networks

BBC removes hCalendar Microformat from programmes page

halans — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 05:19:51 +0000

The BBC is removing its Microformats support from its programmes page as they are having a number of concerns over hCalendar’s use of the abbreviation design pattern in regard to accessibility. But at the same time they are also looking into RDFa as a future replacement.

Post from Jean-Jacques Halans MarkupAsAnApi blog.

BBC removes hCalendar Microformat from programmes page

PodiPodi/Catalog web-based CLI

halans — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 03:04:44 +0000

PodiPodi is a web-based command line interface like Quicksilver (on Mac) or Enso (on Win) for the desktop:

“A special widget which integrates a smart command line interface and a bunch of additional services directly into your website to perform common web-tasks”

PodiPodi offers an alternative UI to your website for power-users. By hitting a shortcut like Ctrl+z you get a jQuery powered command line widget which gives you additional information on the site, a sitemap, Flickr pictures, google search,… Have a play at their playground.

“PodiPodi” doesn’t really roll of the tongue very well though…

An alternative to PodiPodi (which requires web developers to integrate this into their site) could be a Firefox extention like Catalog which puts the same powerful command line interface under your fingers, but then for every webpage you visit. Unfortunately active development seem to be stalled.

Both apps show the power of extending your website under the hood, giving your visitors more power on how they navigate and use your website.

Post from Jean-Jacques Halans MarkupAsAnApi blog.

PodiPodi/Catalog web-based CLI