Microformats in plain English: The content we read on the Internet using our browser is HTML. Some of those contents belong to a particular category (logically). Examples: Contact details, Events, etc. Take this scenario, lets say that you received an e-mail from your friend and your friend has sent his new address in the content of the e-mail. How nice would it be if you can add that contact details of your friend to your favorite contacts manager applications with just a click of a button without you leaving the browser?
Take another scenario. You are going through Sun's Tech Days website and you see that there is a program next Sunday at your city at 12:00 PM. How nice would it be to add this event to your favorite Calendar application with just a click of a button so that it is added to your schedule and you will be reminded automatically? It would be very nice to do so.
For now, the contact detail or the event detail is lying in the HTML page just like any other text or image and there is no way a software can differentiate them from the normal content. This is where Microformats are going to play a big role. The web site developer while constructing the HTML page will add some meta-data to these content which will tell the browser that the microformatted content belongs to a particular category (say, a contact detail or an event). Then the browser will visually indicate you about the content in someway and provide you an interface to do the action you would like to do (say, add that event to your Calendar). Isn't it cool?
Well, this is what I understood from what I read. It could be completely different.
References:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microformats
- http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2006/12/11/microformats-part-0-introduction
PS: I noticed several times Gmail detecting the events in my e-mails' content and presenting an option to add it to Google Calendar. Bravo Gmail! You are ahead of time!
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