Book Review: Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0

Microformats: giving birth to the semantic web

I just finished reading Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0. I've heard of microformats here and there over the last 3 or 4 years, but until now, I haven't really looked into them. I saw this book for sale on Amazon.com at a price I couldn't resist. It was high about time that I read about what this semantic web thing is all about.

I thought the semantic web was simply about using the appropriate XHTML when creating your web pages and being sure that you were meeting various other standards along the way, such as WCAG. The semantic web is that and much more.

Microformats give web content designers and developers a way to use existing XHTML to markup their content so that it can be easily read by humans but also easily read by machines. This has the advantage that, obviously, humans can read it, but that the content can be aggregated by various web services.

This book is one of the best organized books I have ever read and I highly recommend reading this book for a detailed, but quick introduction to microformats. In fact, microformats are so easy to use, an introduction is all you really need to begin using them. If you need more information, just check out microformats.org.

This review is written using the hReview format as discussed in the book. Since this is my first attempt at using this microformat, if there's anything wrong with it, please leave a comment. In any event, I give this book 5 stars out of 5.