What is a Microformat?

"Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards"

The concept of a Microformat might be best seen as a subset of an existing technology focusing on solving a specific problem or an open source data format that can be used to solve a problem.


It's hardly new - not in web terms. Microformats are a method of marking-up types of content to be easily lifted or shared with other websites or applications. For instance, the name and address of your company can have certain class names attributed to your HTML elements. These class-names can then be read by a web app, which will allow a site visitor to insert those details directly into your address book with the click of a link. Microformats are not that difficult to apply - in most cases it's just a slight modification of your HTML classes.


Put in more plain English, it’s about marking up your (X)HTML with semantic and predefined class names and ids. If everyone uses the same class names for a certain type of data, we can write programs to parse it.

More info found in