Wondering what microformats are?
Maybe you haven’t heard of microformats or maybe you have but really haven’t had time to check them out? If you use Dreamweaver you are in luck, the Dreamweaver Task Force has released a microformats extension as a beta. So far it supports hCalendar, hCard, rel-license, rel-tag and XFN.
To put it in some UW perspective, the CLF is more of a macroformat as it lays out the larger structure div id’s for a site. That is why as it stands ‘out-of-the-box’ its a largely unfinished product but it does give you the skeleton to start your site with that works consistently with a given set of CSS files. Microformats are just smaller specialized skeletons that give you a set of id’s and classes that are semantically relevant and machine friendly. It is sort of like bringing in some of that XML goodness to XHTML without resorting to XSLT.
Why is this a good thing to have consistent formatting? Well if you wanted to parse the data (now or in the future) on your pages, it just got a lot easier to ensure you parse the correct data. You still need to add style and content (flesh) to microformats as you do with the UW macroformat – CLF.
Go give the microformats extension a try and take a look at the code, it might help you wrap your head around the technique.
Speaking at TODCON 8
Looks like I am off to TODCON 8 in Orlando for the long weekend in May. I will be presenting on two topics: Building sites in Dreameaver for Contribute and Leveraging Web 2.0 in Higher Education. Both are currently scheduled for the Sunday. The first topic is pretty much what we do around here. The second presentation used that ‘buzz word’ we all love—but should cover some cool things that are relatively simple to implement.
The line up for TODCON 8 is pretty good – Derek Featherstone,Vicki Berry,Scott Fegette,Stephanie Sullivan, and Tom Green are just some of the presenters.
Presentations and such will be posted here once they are done.
IE 7 beta 2 is out with CSS fixes!
Dave Shea is down at MIX06 and has posted a nice summary of events he participated in which includes a note about fixes in IE 7 beta:
“Summary for the rest of us: Floats, overflow, and the like? Fixed. Done. It’s over. No more inconsistency, it looks like that’s a wrap. We get min-width and max-width. Oh, joyous day. CSS2 selectors? You name it. There’s only one remaining which might not make it into IE7, the rest are all there.”
This sounds good… I will have to get Virtual PC fired up and check this out. You can get the IE teams word on IE 7 on their blog as well as where to download it.
Another positive note from Dave Shea’s post is that IE 7 is not the last version… there is talk of 7.5!
Co-op job at Adobe in Ottawa
No idea if its in jobmine but the Adobe blogger Mike Potter have a post about a co-op job at Adobe so I thought I would mention it here (cause I know more students than staff read this thing). Seems to be a position students here are more than qualified for 
If you get the job and you applied because I posted it here, let me know!
Google search API issues
Once in a while the Google search API decides to act up. No idea why but it does. There is a thread on the Google API list that suggests this is unusual but UW isn’t the only place that is having problems. I am sorry to those who are inconvenienced buy the search acting up, we have made a couple changes to make it easier:
- better error message with a link to the google/UW search (always works and it is doesn’t make you search again)
- caching of search results makes short term outages unnoticeable—but we will need to extend caching times to more than 24 hours I think
- version 3.0 of the search will have the ability to detect the error, give you a note about it, and give you Yahoo! API results instead—how that works with the UI is still a good question I might make the search a sourceforge project as well… so anyone can add to it, but I am not sure what do about the API key yet.
In the meantime version 2.7 should be out for testing soon, it uses the UW LDAP search for people rather than UWDir—UWDir is annoying at times. Makes partial matches a lot easier as well.
Again my apologies for any problems…
