Microformats: Boon or Bane?

> The minute you introduce a microformat into your HTML, the semantics of the class attribute have been permanently altered.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#h-7.5.2

> The class attribute has several roles in HTML:

> * As a style sheet selector (when an author wishes to assign style information to a set of elements).

> * For general purpose processing by user agents.

So not really, he just doesn't know what the semantics always were. Understandable, since like most people he probably first encountered the class attribute as part of learning CSS.

The rest of the article has some decent points.

HTML has a reputation of being "easy" and it just sad to see how many luminaries just don't care enough to educate themselves at leas a bit about such easy language. "CSS class" my [censored]. Luckily a lot of commenters set things straight.

The “stars” and other bits of data that make their way into Google’s search results come under their umbrella term, “Rich Snippets”. You can specify them as Microformats or RDFa and they currently look at information about reviews, people, products, and organisations.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answe...

http://knol.google.com/k/google-rich-snippets/google-rich-sn...

I was wondering how the "X post" or "4 stars" info was making it into the google search results. I was thinking that google may have been parsing the data somehow, or that the site itself was providing that information somewhere. It seems that if google is indexing microformat information, it has some foot hold already. If the microformats specs are as bad as Atwood makes them sound, hopefully the attention they are receiving will force them to tight the spec up.

Neat trick: replace "Microformats" with "XML".