Welcome to the microformats wiki!

The Semantic Web continues to break new ground, and Web 3.0 seems to be a term that people associate with it. In the backwaters of semantics, microformats...

microformats are extensions to HTML for marking up notes, people, organizations, events, locations, blog posts, products, reviews, resumés, recipes etc. Sites use microformats to publish a standard API that is consumed and used by search engines, aggregators, and other tools.

James Simmons writes about some of the pros and cons of Microformats and RDF (with an extended discussion at InfoQ). On the benefits of Microformats (with which he means Microformats.org-style microformats) he mentions: Designed for humans first, machines second Modularity / embeddability Enables and encourages decentralized development, content, services A design principle for formats Adapted to current behaviors and usage patterns Highly correlated with semantic XHTML I am new to RDF and the semantic web (but have used microformats in previous web projects) but to me the advantages of RDF and RDFa (the “sprinkling” framework) are clear. Microformats may work for a limited set of use cases but I have not yet understood how to use microformats efficiently for the bulk of what I need. However, it is great that a lot of development is going on in the area of embedding machine readable data in documents. Without microformats the pace would probably have been much slower.