I was asked by someone at work to come up with a non-technical definition of microformats for some glossary of web terms they’re putting together. Here’s what I came up with:
bq. Using standards that exist today, microformats take the HTML used to build the web and turn it into powerful, semantic, machine-readable, web-service ready data – without changing the specification or changing how HTML is written or delivered.
And here’s what the amazing Paul Downey came up with on Twitter
bq. Microformats for non-techies: colours on a Web page for things such as “date” and “telephone number” which only computers can see
I like Paul’s better. Oh, and you should check out Paul’s presentation on Web API’s. The man creates the best slides in the business.
But surely Paul’s statement is an illustration or example of a possible result a microformat could produce, not than a definition. Still, it does get a point across for complete non-techies, while your definition requires someone to be at least a mini-techie…