Definition:
Designed for “humans first, second machines,” microformat is an open-source data format standard that builds on existing frameworks (such as XML, HTML, Atom, or RSS). A microformat can be used in HTML pages through the use of microformat tags, which allow crawlers to search for information on the web. Microformats are actively used by blogging and other web editing activities.
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Microformats
Microformats are bits of code that provide information from a website. telling search engines what kind of data it is. They are like “tags” for different sections of web content. For example, if the physical address of a business appears on your website, the microformats will tell Google: This is the street of the business, this is the city, this is the province and this is the zip code.
If, for example, a website has book reviews, microformats can tell search engines what the title is, what a user ranking is, and other useful information.
Origin of microformats
Microformats are born as an agile movement and maintained by an awakened community, in the face of the “passivity” and slowness of expert organizations such as the W3C. Its main objective is to approach the semantic web, and do it in a simple and undr traumatic way. No new technologies are used, since it is based on the current XHTML, and more specifically on the attributes that tags can have. From there, it plays with existing formats to move it to the web, without making drastic changes, simply by changing key attributes.
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