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…