Microformats for Web Services and Portable Content

Kevin Lawver

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What are Microformats?

• A set of HTML attribute values that add meaning to otherwise generic content.
• An implementation of existing web standards, not new standards

Where are They Used Today?

• By companies like:
  • AOL
  • Yahoo
  • Technorati
  • LinkedIn
  • Ma.gnolia and others
  • Eventful
  • Edgeio
  • Many more!
• By individual developers and bloggers all over the world
• See all the implementations

Existing Web Services

• Technorati
  • hcard to vcf service
  • hcal to ical service
• AIM Pages
  • Service to pull individual modulet modules from AIM Pages
  • Example
• See the implementations page for more

Existing Parsers

• Ruby: mofo
• PHP: hKit
• Javascript: Sumo
• Python: Python Microformat Parser

Use Case: Widgets

• AIM Pages provides a web service around modules
• Any page on AIM Page is a web service.
• Example

Demo: Incestuous Widgets

• My Page has a list of conferences I'm attending.
• Me Evil Twin's Page has one too!
• If I sign in as me and to go my evil twin's page, it shows the events we're both going to!

Incestuous Widgets: How It Works

• Grabs the visitor's my-events module if it's there.
• Looks for URLs that are in the current page's my-events module.
• Builds and then displays list of shared events.
• the code

Use Case: Mashups and Portable Content

• When your page is the API, people don't need fancy REST or SOAP APIs.
• You only have to build it once, and then see how people use it.

Demo: Mashups and Portable Content

• Ficlets has lots of different feeds
• But, it's missing feeds for prequels and sequels.
• Les Orchard created his own prequel/sequel feed from our microformatted content

Use Case: OpenID

• OpenID provides distributed identity - all based on URLs.
• What if those URLs contained hcards?

Profile Demo

• Built on Ruby on Rails
• Uses OpenID for authentication
• When it returns, it grabs the identity URL and looks for HCards using mofo
• Populates your profile with the data if it finds an hcard.
• Download it (coming soon)

Use Case: Feeds Without Feeds

• What if you didn't need a feed? What if your content was so well described on the page you could use that as the feed?

Demo: AIM Pages (if the network works)

• I build a "cheap" blog module for AIM Pages
• I wanted a feed, but didn't want to have to figure out how to write out another file to the user's directory.
• Microformats to the rescue!

Demo: AIM Pages: Building the Feed

1. Using PHP, I grabbed that module of the page
2. Parsed out the hatom feed using DOM methods
3. Return it as ATOM

Demo: Rails + hpricot (if the network doesn't work)

• Using Rails and hpricot, I built an hatom to ATOM conversion.
• Demo

Conclusion

• Produce content once, then repurpose
• Don't want XHTML anymore? Transform it!
• Use data from everywhere without dealing with APIs
• Get the "semantic web" today.

Q&A