Yahoo Open search to support Microformats

Yahoo's Amit mar has mentioned in their official Yahoo search blog that Yahoo will be supporting Microformats in their opensearch



According to yahoo
"By supporting semantic web standards, Yahoo! Search and site owners can bring a far richer and more useful search experience to consumers. For example, by marking up its profile pages with microformats, LinkedIn can allow Yahoo! Search and others to understand the semantic content and the relationships of the many components of its site. With a richer understanding of LinkedIn's structured data included in our index, we will be able to present users with more compelling and useful search results for their site. The benefit to LinkedIn is, of course, increased traffic quality and quantity from sites like Yahoo! Search that utilize its structured data. "

So what is Microformat According to wikipedia

A microformat (sometimes abbreviated μF or uF) is a web-based[1] data formatting approach that seeks to re-use existing content as metadata, using only XHTML and HTML classes[2] and attributes.[3] This approach is intended to allow information intended for end-users (such as contact information, geographic coordinates, calendar events, and the like) to also be automatically processed by software.
Although the content of web pages is technically already capable of "automated processing," and has been since the inception of the web, there are certain limitations. This is because the traditional markup tags used to display information on the web do not describe what the information means.[4] Microformats are intended to bridge this gap by attaching semantics, and thereby obviate other, more complicated methods of automated processing, such as natural language processing or screen scraping. The use, adoption and processing of microformats enables data items to be indexed, searched for, saved or cross-referenced, so that information can be reused or combined.[4]
Current microformats allow the encoding and extraction of events, contact information, social relationships and so on. More are being developed. Version 3 of the Firefox browser,[5] as well as version 8 of Internet Explorer[6] are expected to include native support for microformats.

Several microformats have been developed to enable semantic markup of particular types of information.

hAtom - for marking up Atom feeds from within standard HTML
hCalendar - for events
hCard - for contact information; includes:
adr - for postal addresses
geo - for geographical coordinates (latitude, longitude)
hReview - for reviews
hResume - for resumes or CVs
rel-directory - for distributed directory creation and inclusion
rel-nofollow, an attempt to discourage 3rd party content spam (e.g. spam in blogs).
rel-tag - for decentralized tagging (Folksonomy)
xFolk - for tagged links
XHTML Friends Network (XFN) - for social relationships
XOXO - for lists and outlines

[edit] Proposed microformats
Among the many proposed microformats,[9] the following are undergoing active development:

citation - for citing references
currency - for amounts of money
geo extensions - for places on Mars, The Moon, and other such bodies; for altitude; and for collections of waypoints marking routes or boundaries
species - For the names of living things.
measurements - For physical quantities, structured data-values.

[edit] Uses of microformats
Using microformats within HTML code provides additional formatting and semantic data that can be used by applications. These could be applications that collect data about on-line resources, such as web crawlers, or desktop applications such as e-mail clients or scheduling software.

Several browser extensions, such as Operator, provide the ability to detect microformats within an HTML document and export them into formats compatible with contact management and calendar utilities, such as Microsoft Outlook.

Microsoft expressed a desire to incorporate Microformats into upcoming projects;[10] as have other software companies.

In Wikipedia - and more generally in MediaWiki - microformats are used as part of templates like {{coord}}.


[edit] Evaluation of microformats
Various commentators have offered review and discussion on the design principles and practical aspects of microformats. Additionally, microformats have been compared to other approaches that seek to serve the same or similar purpose.[11] From time to time, there is criticism of a single, or all, microformats.[11] Documented efforts to advocate both the spread and use of microformats are known to exist as well.[12] [13] Håkon Wium Lie has said we will see "a bunch of microformats being developed, and that's how the semantic web will be built." [14]


[edit] Design principles
Computer scientist and entrepreneur, Rohit Khare stated that reduce, reuse, and recycle is "shorthand for several design principles" that motivated the development and practices behind microformats.[8][15] These aspects can be summarized as follows:

Reduce: favor the simplest solutions and focus attention on specific problems;
Reuse: work from experience and favor examples of current practice;
Recycle: encourage modularity and the ability to embed, valid XHTML can be reused in blog posts, RSS feeds, and anywhere else you can access the web.[8]

[edit] Accessibility
Because some microformats make use of title attribute of HTML's abbr element to conceal machine-readable data (particularly date-times and geographical coordinates) in the "abbr design pattern", the plain text content of the element is inaccessible to those screenreaders that expand abbreviations.[16]


[edit] Intellectual property
As part of the open participation model of the microformats community to require that all contributions be placed into the public domain. This means that any page created, or any content added to microformats is placed into the public domain for maximum possible reuse.


[edit] Alternative approaches
Microformats are not the only solution for providing "more intelligent data" on the web. Alternative approaches exist and are under development as well. For example, the use of XML markup and standards of the semantic web are cited as alternative approaches. [8] Some contrast these with microformats in that they do not necessarily coincide with the design principles of "reduce, reuse, and recycle", at least not to the same extent.[8]

One advocate of microformats, Tantek Çelik, characterized a problem with alternative approaches:

" Here's a new language we want you to learn, and now you need to output these additional files on your server. It's a hassle. (Microformats) lower the barrier to entry.[4] "

For some applications the use of other approaches may be valid. If one wishes to use microformat-style embedding but the type of data one wishes to embed does not map to an existing microformat, one can use RDFa to embed arbitrary vocabularies into HTML. An example of this would be embedding domain-specific scientific data on the Web like zoological or chemical data, where no microformat for such data exists. Furthermore, standards such as W3C's GRDDL allow microformats to be converted into data compatible with the Semantic Web.[17]

Another advocate of microformats, Ryan King, put the compatibility of microformats with other approaches this way:

" Microformats provide an easy way for many people to contribute semantic data to the web. With GRDDL all of that data is made available for RDF Semantic Web tools. Microformats and GRDDL can work together to build a better web. [17]