microformats are extensions to HTML for marking up people, organizations, events, locations, blog posts, products, reviews, resumes, recipes etc. Sites use microformats to publish a standard API that is consumed and used by search engines, aggregators, and other tools. See what-are-microformats for more.
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Introduction
This wiki is the central resource of the microformats community and provides microformats authoring guides, references, specifications, drafts, publishing patterns, research, brainstorming, and issue tracking.
Get Started
Get started with microformats:
- First, make sure your pages and web apps use semantically rich, descriptive, ‘POSH’ HTML.
- Mark-up your contact info with hCard (see authoring tips, examples) and link from your personal site to other profiles with rel-me.
- Questions? Read the frequently asked questions, ask on the IRC channel.
- Want to learn more in person? Check out microformats events.
How to contribute
Want to join in and contribute?
- Get started by adding microformats to your website, services, and products
- Advocate the use of microformats on other web sites, especially those you use
- Read how-to-play before editing this wiki
- Join the IRC Channel and mailing lists to learn and help answer questions (read general guidelines before posting).
- Write a testimonial
- Do something on the to do list.
- Translate this microformats wiki into other languages to make microformats more accessible to readers of languages around the world.
- Before proposing any new microformats, make sure your website is POSH, uses existing microformats, and then read the process.
This wiki has a number of enhancements to assist development and contributions to microformats. Before you start editing, see the wiki introduction page for instructions.
Specifications
The list of current, stable Microformats open standard specifications.
- hCalendar - events
- hCard - people, organizations, contacts
- rel-license - licensed content
- rel-nofollow - links in untrusted 3rd party content
- rel-tag - tag posts and pages by subject
- XFN - social relationships and rel-me links among profiles for the same person
- XMDP - define a microformat vocabulary / profile
- XOXO - outlines
Drafts
Drafts are newer microformats, which are still making their way through the process to become specifications. Implementers should be prepared to keep abreast of future developments and changes. Please watch the wiki pages for updates.
- adr - address location information
- geo - latitude & longitude location (WGS84 geographic coordinates)
- hAtom - blog posts and other date-stamped content
- hListing - listings for products or services
- hMedia - media info about images, video, audio
- hNews - news articles, extension of hAtom
- hProduct - products
- hRecipe - cooking+baking recipes
- hResume - individual resumes and CVs
- hReview - individual reviews and ratings
- hReview-aggregate - aggregate reviews and ratings
- rel-author - link to the author's home page (from an article)
- rel-home - link to the homepage of a site
- rel-payment - link to a payment mechanism
If you're tempted to try your hand at writing a microformat please read the process page first!
Exploratory Discussions
New: microformats 2 has sufficiently stabilized to start using on public web pages and developing parsers and applications.
See: exploratory-discussions for details of research and analysis of real-world examples, existing formats, and brainstorming of possible new microformats, per the microformats process.
Design Patterns
Design patterns are common uses of markup across microformats.
- abbr-design-pattern
- class-design-pattern
- date-design-pattern
- datetime-design-pattern
- include-pattern
- value-class-pattern new!
- rel-design-pattern
Archived
Past specifications, drafts, and exploratory discussions which have either lacked (or lost) wide publishing support, implementation, or have been superceded by newer specs (see also when does it make sense to demote a microformat spec). These may eventually be retired, deprecated, or reincorporated into other exploratory discussions.
- hAudio
- rel-directory - link to web directories
- rel-enclosure - link to attachments (e.g. files) to download and cache
- robots exclusion
- VoteLinks
- xFolk - tagged links
Examples
Resources
See resources.
User centric development
Shared work areas
Tools, test cases, additional research
The first place to look for examples, code, and test cases is in the pages for each individual microformat. There are only a few cross-cutting tools and services that need to process more than one microformat. That section is intended for editors, parsers, validators, test cases, and other information relevant across multiple microformats.
Microformats wiki translations
You may read and edit microformats articles in many other languages:
- languages with over 100 articles
- Français (French) mis à jour!
- languages with over 10 articles
- languages with over 2 articles
- languages just started
- پارسی (Farsi) new!
- العربية (Arabic)
- ภาษาไทย (Thai)
- Italiano (Italian) new!
- 한국어 (Korean) new!
- Türkçe (Turkish) new!
- elsewhere
- Wikipedia's article on microformats has been translated into a number of languages.
See also other-languages, and how-to-start-a-new-translation.