microformatting: all the cool kids are doing it
Friday, February 2nd, 2007“Microformats are a codification of convention.” - Aaron Gustafson
On our latest launch, there were two types of typed information besides “about this” and “about that” pages. Contact-related information, and date-related information, both lent themselves to something special…not so much from the UI perspective, but from a coding perspective. For the first time in one of my mainstream projects, I have included microformats.
XLNTads.com is the new site for a project that takes consumer-generated video out of the you-tube format and places it next to some classier competition. When the stakes aren’t necessarily for number of views, but instead, for the viewers to be some world-class brands, it turns up the dial on the quality of the videos being submitted. This site was created by collaborating the design talent of Brian Brossman, IA by Dave Roth of Seventh House inc, and of course crazy-code-skillz by me.
That said, this site is really an expanded “coming soon”…the project is about to launch and the group running it, lead by Rick Parkhill wanted to spread the message of their ideas and intentions. Ultimately, those two most important bits were: how to get in touch to become a partnered brand, or, what the current timeline for the larger launch process would be.
For contact info hCard takes relevant information and formats it using meta-data in the XHTML iteself, so that a microformat processor can go through and strip out the useful information and turn into something portable…like a vcard (which can be picked up by nearly any contact-management application). On every page of XLNTads.com, the contact information is microformatted as such.
For the development timeline, hCalendar was used. This wraps the descriptive information in more detailed meta information, and just like hCard, it can be exported to ical event files, etc. This will allow interested parties to export the timeline to their calendar application to keep track of the progress of the events.
This all may seem very trivial but it’s intended to be somewhat forward thinking. With ideas running around like a totally portable url-identity driven social network, and more portable resume formatting (see if you can find me on linked in, by the way), this is more important for the long haul. If developers like myself spend the little bit of time to implement microformats now, the more active sites down the road will already have the groundwork laid for some really SICK opportunities in the future…
More to come about this initiative, the site, and other things in a new case study…but probably not for another week or so because I’ll be snowboarding.
Until then, you should hcard your identifying information on your personal site.
Tags: microformats, hcal, hcard, xlntads, new launch