Welcome to the microformats wiki!
microformats are HTML for marking up people, organizations, events, locations, blog posts, products, reviews, resumes, recipes etc. Sites use microformats to publish a standard API that is consumed and used by search engines, browsers, and other web sites. See what-are-microformats for more.
- See microformats2 for a technical overview and summary of how to use microformats on public web pages and for APIs.
If you are looking for the microformats.org blog, see:
Introduction
This wiki is the central resource of the microformats community and provides microformats authoring guides, references, specifications, drafts, publishing patterns, research, brainstorming, and issue tracking.
Get Started
Get started with microformats:
- Make sure your pages and web apps use proper ‘POSH’ HTML.
- Mark-up your contact info with h-card, link to other profiles with rel-me
- Mark-up your blog with h-entry. See https://indieweb.org/ for more
- Questions? Read the frequently asked questions, ask on IRC
- Want to learn more in person? Check out microformats events
How to contribute
Want to join in and contribute?
- Get started by adding microformats to your website, services, and products
- Join the IRC Channel to learn and help answer questions.
- Write a testimonial
- Do something on the to do list.
- Translate this microformats wiki into other languages to make microformats more accessible to readers of languages around the world.
- Before proposing any new microformats, make sure your website is POSH, uses existing microformats, and then read the process.
This wiki has a number of enhancements to assist development and contributions to microformats. Before you start editing, see the wiki introduction page for instructions.
Specifications
microformats2 is stable, has a test suite, publishers, and interoperable implementations. Use it on public web pages and developing more parsers and applications.
Current, stable microformats open standard specifications.
Parsing
If you are implementing a microformats2 parser, see:
Vocabularies
microformats2 vocabularies:
- h-adr
- h-card
- h-entry
- h-event
- h-feed
- h-geo
- h-item
- h-listing
- h-product
- h-recipe
- h-resume
- h-review
- h-review-aggregate
rel microformats
Some microformats require only a rel attribute and are widely supported by consuming sites and software.
- rel-author - link to the author's home page (from an article)
- rel-enclosure - link to attachments (e.g. files) to download and cache
- rel-license - licensed content
- rel-nofollow - links in untrusted 3rd party content
- rel-tag - tag posts and pages by subject
- XFN - social relationships and rel-me links among profiles for the same person
Classic Microformats
In addition use well established classic microformats for the primary subject of a page for legacy search engines support.
- hAtom - blog posts and other date-stamped content
- hCalendar - events
- hCard - people, organizations, contacts
- hListing - listings for products or services
- hMedia - media info about images, video, audio
- hProduct - products
- hRecipe - cooking+baking recipes
- hResume - individual resumes and CVs
- hReview - individual reviews and ratings
- hReview-aggregate - aggregate reviews and ratings
- adr - address location information
- geo - latitude & longitude location (WGS84 geographic coordinates)
Classic Drafts
Drafts are classic microformats which have varying degrees of support by consuming applications. They are stable and yet still open to change based on consuming application support, per the process to become specifications.
- hNews - news articles, extension of hAtom
- rel-home - link to the homepage of a site
- rel-payment - link to a payment mechanism
If you're tempted to try your hand at writing a microformat please read the process page first! and then take a look at exploratory-discussions for details of prior research, analysis of real-world examples, existing formats, and brainstorming of possible new microformats, per the microformats process.
Design Patterns
Design patterns are common uses of markup across microformats.
- abbr-design-pattern
- class-design-pattern
- date-design-pattern
- datetime-design-pattern
- include-pattern
- value-class-pattern
- rel-design-pattern
Archived
Past specifications, drafts, and exploratory discussions which have either lacked (or lost) wide publishing support, implementation, or have been superceded by newer specs (see also when does it make sense to demote a microformat spec). These may eventually be retired, deprecated, or reincorporated into other exploratory discussions.
- hAudio
- robots exclusion
- xFolk - tagged links
- rel-directory - link to web directories
- VoteLinks
Examples
Resources
See resources.
User centric development
Tools, test cases, additional research
The first place to look for examples, code, and test cases is in the pages for each individual microformat. There are only a few cross-cutting tools and services that need to process more than one microformat. That section is intended for editors, parsers, validators, test cases, and other information relevant across multiple microformats.
Microformats wiki translations
You may read and edit microformats articles in many other languages:
- languages with over 100 articles
- Français (French) mis à jour!
- languages with over 10 articles
- languages with over 2 articles
- languages just started
- elsewhere
- Wikipedia's article on microformats has been translated into a number of languages.
See also other-languages, and how-to-start-a-new-translation.
community
microformats.org is a community focused on using an empirical (rather than aspirational) process to research web data & information human publishing behaviors, openly document it on our wiki (http://microformats.org/wiki/), discuss it in IRC (irc://irc.freenode.net/microformats), then brainstorm ideas & proposals based on that research for simple formats based on HTML to interoperably represent that information on the web, incrementally implement, and iterate.