Standards Editor: Jim Whitehead •
[email protected] Microformats The Next (Small) Thing on the Semantic Web? Rohit Khare • CommerceNet “Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.” — Microformats.org hen we speak of the “evolution of the is precisely encoding the great variety of person- Web,” it might actually be more appropri- al, professional, and genealogical relationships W ate to speak of “intelligent design” — we between people and organizations. By contrast, can actually point to a living, breathing, and an accidental challenge is that any blogger with actively involved Creator of the Web. We can even some knowledge of HTML can add microformat consult Tim Berners-Lee’s stated goals for the markup to a text-input form, but uploading an “promised land,” dubbed the Semantic Web. Few external file dedicated to machine-readable use presume we could reach those objectives by ran- remains forbiddingly complex with most blog- domly hacking existing Web standards and hop- ging tools. ing that “natural selection” by authors, software So, although any intelligent designer ought to developers, and readers would ensure powerful be able to rely on the long-established facility of enough abstractions for it. file transfer to publish the “right” model of a social Indeed, the elegant and painstakingly inter- network, the path of least resistance might favor locked edifice of technologies, including RDF, adding one of a handful of fixed tags to an exist- XML, and query languages is now growing pow- ing indirect form — the “blogroll” of hyperlinks to erful enough to attack massive information chal- other people’s sites.