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Microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. I am a big fan of microformats and you can find them frequently in this blog. Before I write about what microformats mean to mobile, let me briefly explain, for those who are not familiar with them, what the buzz is all about and why you should use them…

What the heck? Why do we need microformats?

It might not seem so on the first glance, but computers are incredibly stupid, even though they can do impressive things like adding up all the data in your huge Excel file within a blink of an eye. However, those machines can only understand us if we provide them with exactly the input and commands they are expecting. They cannot understand our human languages (yet).

HTML is a markup language to describe how a website should be displayed — not to describe the meaning of a website’s content. Some meta information on the content can be given to a computer by using semantic (= “meaningful”) XHTML.

So instead of writing

<font size="13">What Are Microformats and What Do They Mean to Mobile?</font>

to markup my heading I use a heading tag like

<h3>What Are Microformats and What Do They Mean to Mobile?</h3>.

To display the heading in the preferred size, font, color I can use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). I do not need the <font> tag anymore… at least a computer now knows that this is a heading.

Today, search engines are only analyzing key words on a spidered page. In addition to those key words they determine a ranking for the page to know how important that information might be for others. For search engine optimization (SEO) a semantic markup code in XHTML is a plus, as search engines can better understand the content. If you are writing a post on your blog with the title/heading that contains the keyword “microformat” then the search engines assumes that the whole paragraph below should somehow deal with that topic. Therefore, your site gets a higher ranking for “microformats” compared to a site that just used the word in a paragraph.

Now lets assume a user comes along searching for some content by key words… the search engine digs into its huge databases to see which sites contain those key words and displays the results ordered by their secret ranking algorithm on the screen. But there are so many crappy results that do not interest our fellow searcher… why is that?

Well, search engines don’t understand the content of a website, they only scan it for its key terms based on a statistical analysis. Efforts for text recognition exist, but for the Yahoos and Googles in this world it would not be feasible today to crawl the whole web trying to understand the content of each single page in detail. This might work for a short text, but does not scale to the entire web.

Even many humans are overstrained on understanding texts in their mother language and to determine its meaning. When I think back to German classes in school and the poems we read from Kafka and other poets half of the pupils (including me) didn’t understand the meaning of the text. Did you understand all of that? How should a computer determine the content of a poem by only looking at key terms? In poems the author might leave room for interpretation on purpose. On a news article and most other written text this should not be the case…

How do microformats help?

Microformats are a forerunner of the Semantic Web, which some folks even call Web 3.0. The problem with the “real” Semantic Web is that the new standards are complicated and it takes lots of time and brainpower to use them. We still have to wait some years for the Semantic Web to happen, as this will be a major version change of the web. If we will switch to it at all…

Microformats are “Web 2.5″, simple and built upon open existing standards that web developers already know. They are bridging the gap between the current and the Semantic Web. Instead of using new technologies and standards XHTML class names and other attributes are leveraged to add meaning for machines, helping them to understand the content better.

This does not only help search engines to find the results you are actually looking for. It also helps them to display the results in a better way just as Yahoo showed with their recent announcement of the Yahoo Open Search platform.

Microformat are not only making searches better. Add-ons for browsers exist with which you can grab microformatted data from a site with two clicks and export the data to other applications such as an address book or a calendar. Firefox 3 will have those capabilities build-in. FF 3 will be released in 2008, not decades ahead of us. Rumors say Microsoft is planning to include microformats in Internet Explorer 8. No more Copy/Paste needed.

What microformats are out there?

Plenty of microformats with which you can attach semantics to the markup exist already (or are in the making):

• hCard - People and Organizations
• hCalendar - Calendars and Events
• VoteLinks, hReview - Opinions, Ratings and Reviews
• XFN - Social Networks and Blogs
• rel-license - Licenses
• hReview - Reviews
• geo - Geographic coordinates
• adr - Address Information

I do not want to go into details on how the markup code for those formats looks like, a good example can be found on Wikipedia.

If you are missing a microformat in the list above, check the microformats website first, if you don’t find it, collaborate, specify a draft and create it! Microformats are created by the community in an open process. Everybody is able to propose and elaborate on new formats. The only requirement is that the format solves a problem.

What do microformats mean to mobile?

Obviously many of the previously mentioned microformats make sense on a mobile phone. Instantly add a contact from a mobile web site to your address book with hCard, add an event to the calendar with one click (hCalendar) or directly click on an address to navigate to it, if you have a GPS-enabled phone.

Input to mobile device is cumbersome and should be avoided whenever possible, microformats offer a solution to some of these input problems. Meaning less stupid text prediction à la T9, less Copy/Paste (I even heard some smartphones don’t support this =) but a better experience for the user. A better experience equals more fun, longer sessions, more ad views, higher conversion and more money for the site owner. What does it cost to add microformats to a website? Almost nothing, you basically just have to add some class names to the XHTML markup.

Photo by dlemieux

Although strictly speaking not microformats, because they are not built on XHTML, there are special efforts to bring microformats to mobile - in particular to the plain text in mobile messaging: nanoformats and picoformats.

Nanoformats

Targeted at microblogging services like Twitter and Jaiku, nanoformats try to add semantics to your jabbering. They extend the capabilities of microblogging and provide standards for commonly used parameters:

• @username - Reply to another user
• L:Berlin - Referring to a specific location
• tag++, tag–, username++ - Vote for or against a tag or user
• #tag - Categorize your tweet with a tag
• lang:en - Specify the language
• event: - Describe an event, should be combined with L:

And why should you waste some more characters in your short 140-character tweet? It’s the same reason as for microformats. To describe the stupid computers what you are talking about. Nanoformats enabled services like Hashtags, Tweet Translation and Plusplus Bot, making it easier to monitor topics of your interest.

Picoformats

Communicating and executing commands with mobile devices over SMS is becoming more and more common. Plazes, Remember The Milk, Dopplr, Facebook mobile, Twitter and many others allow users to control the application by sending in specific SMS commands. Picoformats represent an effort to codify those different standards and to openly pursue a nomenclature and syntax for SMS commands.

The question is if it will be possible to standardize these short SMS commands. For applications with similar use cases this might be reasonable, but in general most applications are having very different domains and finding an easy way to interact with the service by SMS is a key aspect of development. The only observation that I could make was that .command is used frequently to send commands to a service and ?query to request the delivery of information to a phone. Unix-based command-line tools have many different purposes as well and face the same problem but most tools obey the standard. So why shouldn’t this work for the SMS-terminal?

So What?

Everybody hopefully understands my passion for microformats, if you made it this far in the article. With only small efforts it is possible to add semantics to your website. When publishing something on the web you want your content to be read, used and distributed. Otherwise you wouldn’t be doing it, would you?

Microformats help to spread your word and make things easier for your visitors, especially on a cell phone when mobile browsers are going to add support for microformats in the future. And as this is happening on the desktop we probably won’t have to wait a long time for this feature.

Nano- and picoformats, the microformats for mobile messaging, are still in their infancy and only a couple are frequently used on services today. It is questionable if these efforts will take off. Creating web sites is something that is done by skilled web designers that (hopefully) know the languages they are using. It should be easy for them to understand the benefit of microformats. Twitter and the others microblogging services are still used by many web geeks, but in the end, they are tools that anybody can use. The idea behind nano- and picoformats is great, I just do not think my sister will want to spend time to produce a semantically correct tweet, do you?