Web Versions at the Speed of Light
Ok so you’ve finally wrapped your brain around the concept that is Web 2.0 and you no doubt making a diligent effort to stay abreast of all the happenings in the space. Ajax is old news , ruby on rails doesnt excite you anymore, your’e wondering how long Facebook will stay “cool” before someone else comes in to tear the rug out from under Mark Zuckermans Feet.
Good News !! Microformats and Web 3.0 are here and in effect!!
Many argue that the evolution of Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 will be quick and invisible to the user. The Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web will be a web of DATA and wont be part of the web you know today.
Mull on this :
“Today you can see your photographs, appointments on your calendar, email on demand but can you see your photos in a calendar to see what you were doing when you took them? “
You cant…Because we don’t have a web of data. Because data is controlled by applications, and each application keeps it to itself.
The Semantic Web is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where on the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents.
It is about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of relational databases (connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.”)
Now that we know what the Semantic Web is at a high level… lets talk Microformats !!
The official microformats.org web site defines microformats thus:
“Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.”
Through the use of these widely adopted standards, publishers can encode additional semantics into the HTML markup of web pages. This gives the pages meaning above and beyond the face value of the HTML elements, allowing them to be consumed, remixed, and mashed up. For example, by adding some semantic markup to a web page that describes an upcoming event, properties such as the event dates can easily be extracted and used by other services and software, like calendars and personal organizers.
Microformats are all about representing semantic information encoded within a web page, allowing that information to be leveraged in ways that were possibly never conceived by the original publisher. The idea to put more semantic information directly into HTML is nothing new — people in the web industry have been discussing this concept for over ten years — but, through the efforts of many volunteers, enough documentation, support, code libraries, and tools have been created to generate significant momentum behind microformats. The idea is finally becoming reality.
microformats are:
- a way of thinking about data
- design principles for formats
- adapted to current behaviors and usage patterns (“Pave the cow paths.”)
- highly correlated with semantic XHTML, AKA the real world semantics, AKA lowercase semantic web, AKA lossless XHTML
- a set of simple open data format standards that many are actively developing and implementing for more/better structured blogging and web microcontent publishing in general.
- “An evolutionary revolution”
- all the above.
microformats are not:
- a new language
- infinitely extensible and open-ended
- an attempt to get everyone to change their behavior and rewrite their tools
- a whole new approach that throws away what already works today
- a panacea for all taxonomies, ontologies, and other such abstractions
- defining the whole world, or even just boiling the ocean
- any of the above
the microformats principles
- solve a specific problem
- start as simple as possible
- design for humans first, machines second
- reuse building blocks from widely adopted standards
- modularity / embeddability
- enable and encourage decentralized development, content, services
Heres a Cheat Sheet:
Read more at http://microformats.org
