Go Microformats!

The crew here at Mix Online believe in Microformats. But don't just believe us: look at the adoption of Microformats in the wild. There are over a billion web pages with content formatted to the hCard specification and nearly 100 million formatted to the hCalendar specification. Top web properties including Yahoo, LinkedIn, Eventful, Twitter and YouTube are using Microformats. At MIX06, Bill Gates, gave props to Microformats in his keynote: "We need Microformats and to get people to agree on them. It is going to bootstrap exchanging data on the web."

Oomph: A Microformat Toolkit

With the momentum of Microformats burgeoning, we decided to build Oomph: A Microformat Toolkit. Our main goal with Oomph is to make Microformats more accessible for developers and designers. Oomph is an amalgamation of applications: an Internet Explorer Add-in built in C++ that finds Microformats on a page; a cross-browser HTML overlay built using JQuery that aggregates Microformats; a set of beautiful CSS styles for Microformats; and a Windows Live Writer plug-in written in WinForms for inserting hCards. And, the entire project is up on Codeplex, ready for community contribution and extensibility.

Consume

Perhaps the most ambitious aspect of Oomph is the Internet Explorer Add-in and the accompanying cross-browser HTML overlay. For those who install the Add-in, pages with Microformats will "light up" aggregating and mapping the content as well as providing options to export the data. Architecturally, the Add-in actually injects a line of Javascript into web pages with Microformats. This Javascript can also be manually added to web pages, providing a cross-browser experience. You can see an example of this here.

Style

Because Microformats are based on a standard set of HTML class attributes, styling Microformats with CSS makes a lot of sense. As such, we are providing a set of CSS styles that can be used to make Microformatted content look great, including even a grunge themed style!

Create

Before you can style or consume Microformats, you need to create them. With this in mind, we have built an hCard Windows Live Writer Plug-in for adding contact information to your blog posts. The great thing about WLW is that it targets most blog platforms, including Windows Live Spaces, SharePoint, Wordpress, Blogger and many others. As blogs are becoming the CMS systems de rigueur, adding Microformats to blogs certainly adds up.

Shout Outs

We would like to thank a whole range of people who have inspired and helped the project get off the ground:

• Michael Kaply and his Operator Add-in for Firefox, which was inspirational.
• John Allsopp, whose book on Microformats was essential reading for the whole team.
• All of the folks on the microformats-discuss alias, whose passion for Microformats kept us invigorated.
• The authors of jQuery, whose library we have fallen in love with.