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

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

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

Post from Jean-Jacques Halans MarkupAsAnApi blog.

On Portable Social Networks

Post from Jean-Jacques Halans MarkupAsAnApi blog.

BBC removes hCalendar Microformat from programmes page

“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

Poshformats on the other hand are various data formats constructed by using common, semantic class names, which are less formal than microformats. Whenever some one or some organisation creates a common class name, this is considered a ‘poshformat’, like for example the hRelease for pressreleases, or MacroID, a small decentralized verifiable identity format.

Andy Clarke talks about meaningful mark-up over at StuffAndNonsense, on The Fine Art of Markup and discusses What’s in a name, covering the conventions webdevelopers use in naming their id’s for page elements (way back in 2004). So, do you follow convention?

Picture by kk+

Post from Jean-Jacques Halans MarkupAsAnApi blog.

The practice of POSH

We read these documents, we print them, bookmark them for later retrieval. We might copy/paste content into another document, constructing a new one.

If we wanted to automate this, we’d resort tot screen scraping. But this easily breaks, as there’s no standard or “contract” between the original site and the screen scraper.

Or we’d go for duplicating content into a new format like XML, with an agreed upon format. That way we could build product price aggregators using SOA Web Services with SOAP, WSDL,… Or use a REST architecture which takes us a bit closer back to our original HTTP request.

Most popular formats for sharing (XML) data is RSS and Atom, were again we duplicate the content we publish online.

But we’ve come a long way last couple of years, towards Web Standards, pushed by organisations like the Web Standards Project (WaSP) and Web Standards Group (WSG). They promote standards for separation of content, styling and behaviour, and the use of semantic HTML.

And then there’s the W3C, who promotes the Semantic Web as knowledge representation, using Resource Description Framework. RDF is a general method of modelling information making statements about resources in triples. Triples represent a subject-predicate-object expression, for example JJ – isBornIn – Belgium.

The W3C’s Web Ontology Language, or OWL, provides additional vocabulary and formal semantics, providing greater machine interpretability of Web content, but with added complexity.

But as of yet there isn’t much RDF data online, or ontologies are missing for many application domains. The W3C’s projects are rather academic, and aren’t close to any web developer’s mindset.

What is closer to the web developer though is semantic HTML, the correct use of heading levels and paragraphs to introduce structure, blockquotes and correct use of tables, for tabular data.

Now we add rich semantics, standardised Microformats. They are small pieces of metadata, within the markup, using CSS. They are discoverable, interpreted by machines.

Post from Jean-Jacques Halans MarkupAsAnApi blog.

Markup as an API

I keep a look out for new developements in Semantic Web technologies, search engines, Microformats, mark up,… and describe them here as a reference for myself, and you!

Post from Jean-Jacques Halans MarkupAsAnApi blog.

Hello world! This is MAAA!