Microformats… “big” user experience

I’m not an IT girl… and I don’t understand a lot of IT stuff…

But sometimes I’m involved in projects that help me to understand how the IT guys & girls are working with us in order to deliver the best experience to our users. That’s why I decided to write a small post about the “microformats” (even though I didn’t understand them a 100% -> maybe due to my lack of IT neuronios !).

So, copied and pasted from microformats.org:

- 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 (yes!!! :-))))
. Reuse building blocks from widely adopted standards
. Modularity / embeddability
. Enable and encourage decentralized development, content, services

So, if you want to read more about it, here is some initial links:
- Microformats.org
- Wikipedia (ENG)

And if you want to “see” how it works, try the new Google microformat recipe search: http://www.google.com/landing/recipes/. I’ve tried it, it’s great and easier to find everyday dinner ideas!

See you!