Who You Calling A Jesse?

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.