Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool

September 2nd, 2009

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?

Category: Microformats, Semantic Web

Author: JJ Halans

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What happened to the design? CSS Naked Day April 9

April 9th, 2009

Yes, it’s international CSS Naked Day today! That’s why everything looks a bit black and white (and blue).

You wonder why? CSS Naked Day is about raising awareness about Web Standards and accessibility, the proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a decent hierarchy structure. It’s time to show off my gorgeous <body>!

To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.

Category: Semantic Web

Author: JJ Halans

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Yahoo queries microformats

January 17th, 2009

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

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CSS Counters

January 13th, 2009

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

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Google developments

January 12th, 2009

Google had some interesting, newsworthy developments last week:

Category: Semantic Web

Author: JJ Halans

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Semantics in HTML 5

January 7th, 2009

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

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Microformat tools

December 11th, 2008

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…

Category: Microformats, Semantic Web

Author: JJ Halans

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Top 10 of Semantic Web 2008

December 7th, 2008

ReadWriteWeb has published their Top 10 for 2008 of Semantic Web products. The list includes Yahoo SearchMonkey, Open Calais, Powerset,…

Looking at the list, I’m not too impressed. Searchmonkey is cool, but all the others are rather gimmicky. They are all semantic web for semantic webs sake. When will we see integrated solutions, like SearchMonkey?

Category: Semantic Web

Author: JJ Halans

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Mapanui

November 17th, 2008

Have been plugging Mapanui a bit at Webjam8 (September), Ignite Spatial and Sydney Barcamp. Fun and iteresting feedback.

Category: Semantic Web

Author: JJ Halans

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Microsoft and microformats

October 27th, 2008

Good to see another big player (finally) jumping on the microformats bandwagon, joining Yahoo! Microsoft introduces Oomph, a microformats toolkit, which includes an IE plugin and server-side javascript. Not sure about the name though. Additionally IE8 will support a feature called WebSlice, which is an hAtom based (MS propriatory) microformat.

Additionally, John Allsopp has a great introductory article at  Microformats: the Quiet Revolution, so if you still don’t know what microformats are, have a read.

Category: Semantic Web

Author: JJ Halans

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