On the wiki

• Din Neville has been working hard this week, updating the Russian translation of the wiki. Thank you, Din.
• datetime-design-pattern contains documentation and discussion of alternative patterns to represent dates and times.
• The parsers page has fallen a little out of date. If you’d like to help update it with links to current available parsers, please help!
• There’s a new html5 page to track changes in HTML5 which will affect microformats (both positive and negative). Not that these issues don’t affect parsing now, and won’t do until HTML5 is stable.

On the mailing lists

Discuss and Dev have been very busy with discussion around the abbr datetime pattern, there’s a lot of it and the threads cross over quite a lot. The core of these discussions should be documented on the wiki on the aforementioned page over the course of this week. The main threads are in the archive page for µf-dev and the archive page for µf-discuss

Other discussions:

• Impact of vCard 4 on hCard

On the web

• Rob Crowther has documented how to use the new microformat API in your Firefox 3 extensions
• Google have added hCard in Google Maps
• Lustro is an application to export the Mac OSX Address Book into hCards
• vAddressBook is a hack to export your Yahoo! Address Book as hCards (with hCalendar events for birthdays)
• Portable Social Networks, The Building Blocks Of A Social Web, an article by Ben Ward in Digital Web Magazine
• David Singleton’s XFN Life Stream tool shows distributed social networking powered by microformats.
• Cognition 0.1 alpha 10 was released.
• Yahoo! Search Monkey has a suggestion board for requesting new features for their microformats enhancements to Search.
• Mail Chimp have started adding hCard mark-up in the footer of HTML emails sent through their service. An interesting experiment with microformats outside the browser.
• Ueli Weiss has written a great hCard-based profile importer, allowing you to pre-fill sign up forms with hCard info, given just a URL. There’s a demo available, too.
• Kornel Lesinski has released an hCard conformance checker (validator). See using microformats.org.

Elsewhere

• It was microformats third birthday on June 20th!
• Weekly Microformats Dinner events are taking place in San Francisco

To contribute to the next issue, please edit the wiki page. Thanks!

On the wiki

• We’ve documented machine data usage in microformats (date and time formats, geographic locations, keywords in certain formats). The page is a quick reference for all the formats we specify, the all the current supported methods on how to embed data alongside your own text, in an HTML valid manner.

On the µf-Discuss mailing list

• Discussion off the back of the BBC’s request for help learning about screen reader usage.

On the web

• The BBC are asking for help in finding out how people use screen reader applications to read web pages aloud; critically, whether they have them set to always read the title attribute of abbreviation elements. Please give them some feedback if you can, it helps improve the information we have to work with on future patterns.
• Martin McEvoy has released TransFormr: A Simple set of XSLT and PHP tools for Transforming Microformats. (“Read Martin’s introduction from µf -discuss”)
• Hi5 have added hCard and XFN support to their friends lists.
• Mahalo have added microformats to their search result pages.
• Toluu have added an hCard-based profile import function to their sign-up process.

In the real world

• In Germany, Florian Beer has had his thesis on microformats published as a book; Microformats – Semantik für jedermann
• This Tuesday, 27th May, the Microformats vEvent takes place in London.

To contribute to the next issue, please edit the wiki page. Thanks!

On the wiki

• Toby Inkster has compiled a document on transforming XFN into FOAF

On the µf-Discuss mailing list

• Talk about how to use agent in hCard with hAtom to mark up journal entries

On the web

• The quite excellent Optimus transformer and validator tool (supporting all major microformats) has been updated to 0.5.1.
• Fuzzbot is a Mozilla Firefox extension to expose microformat and RDFa data within pages.

This weeks’s bulletin was put together with contributions from Toby Inkster. To contribute to the next issue, please edit the wiki page. Thanks!

On the µf-Discuss mailing list

• Lots of discussion this week about standardising the representation of hCard in JSON . Currently parsers tend to produce sensible but subtly different objects, this is an effort to make it all interoperable. There’s a wiki page and discussions: Standardized Representation of Microformats in JSON and jCard draft.

On the web

• David Jane’s Almost Universal Microformats Parser — written in Python — has been restored to the internet and the project is now hosted publicly on Google Code.
• ReadWriteWeb responds to Yahoo’s hListing deployment. Nestoria have also added hListing support.
• Recordings from SGFooCamp have emerged:
  • Jeremy Keith talked about the password anti-pattern.
  • Leslie Chicoine talks about the challenges of user-interface design, especially with respect to social-network-portability, and discusses what a user should or should not need to know about OpenID, and Satisfaction’s hCard implementation.
  • Tantek Çelik spoke about the origins of XFN, hCard, and hCalendar as well as the need to focus on benefitting the user with improvements in user-interface.
• HubSpot have published a good introduction to working with microformats in Microformats: Inbound Marketing or Computers!.
• SemanticReport interviews Steve Ganz of LinkedIn about the upper and lower-case semantic web and their use of microformats (XFN, hCard, hResume, hCalendar, and hReview.)
• MicroReviews is a Twitter bot that takes posts and republishes them with hReview.

Face-to-Face Events

• San Diego Web Standards Group launch with focus including microformats.
• Announcing Open Web Vancouver 2008 – Apr/14+15 @ Canada Place, Microformats talks include: Microformats and Distributed Social Networks by Chris Messina, Microformats with Ryan King and more…
• Announcing the Microformats vEvent during London Web Week, 27th May 2008.

This weeks’s bulletin was put together with contributions from Frances Berriman, Toby Inkster, Tantek Çelik, Gerald Bauer, David Janes and Brian Suda. To contribute to the next issue, please edit the wiki page. Thanks!

On the wiki

• New profiles have been produced for more microformats. These can be optionally placed in the head element of a page to indicate the use of particular microformats.
• We’ve reorganised the wiki todo list, so it should be clearer to see what we’re all working towards. 

On the µf-Discuss mailing list

• There’s a call for speakers on microformats for the Open Web 2008 Conference in Vancouver on April 14th / 15th

On the µf-New mailing list

• Work on hListing is going to resume shortly — Anyone interesting in marking up listings for classifieds and product listings

On the web

• Cognition 0.1α6 has been been released. — A new parser for metadata embedded in HTML, written in Perl and licensed under the GPL v3.
• What is the Semantic Web? What’s Web 3.0? What are Microformats? Why do Microformats matter? — The “pragmatic” semantic web proposes – let’s just use conventions and best practices for today’s web markup and today’s browsers. Let’s add semantics using Microformats to the event example.
• Mofo – Getting Started w/ Microformats using Ruby – Web 3.0 In Action — Let’s load up the event listing web page for the Ruby on Rails Workshop on the Yahoo! Upcoming service using mofo – a microformat parser in Ruby.
• On YDN there’s an article on the Kelkoo deployment of hListing and using hKit to consume the microformat into a blog listings widget.

This fortnight’s bulletin was put together with contributions from Frances Berriman, Toby Inkster, Tantek Çelik and Gerald Bauer. To contribute to the next issue, please edit the this-week-2008-03-31 wiki page. Thanks!