Microformats: Toward a Semantic Web - Page 2

"Firefox 3 will ship with an API for extracting microformatted content in a Web page," Mozilla's Faaborg told InternetNews.com. "This will allow extension authors to focus on creating a wide variety of innovative user experiences, while leveraging our parser to extract the data."

Faaborg added that Mozilla is also putting a lot of effort into determining the best user interface for interacting with microformatted content, ranging from mocking up different ideas to trying them out with the Operator extension. However, exactly how users may interact with microformatted content with Firefox 3 is still being determined.

It's not clear whether microformat support will be integrated into Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8. A Microsoft spokesperson provided an ambiguous answer noting that Microsoft is committed to Internet Explorer and is actively working on the next version of the browser. The spokesperson noted that Microsoft is not discussing specifics at this time for IE 8.

Whether the browser vendors need to support microformats in order for microformats to become widely available may well be a chicken and egg problem. Web designers wait for native support in browsers, and browser vendors wait to see how the Web will evolve on its own.

"For instance, RSS became popular on the Web before Firefox added a Web feed icon to the location bar," Mozilla's Faaborg explained. "With microformats things are speeding up, and we are starting to see both the chicken and egg appear at more or less the same time.

Ben West of Alexa estimates that there are currently hundreds of millions of pieces of microformatted content on the Web and native support in browsers will of course only drive adoption further."

Toward the mainstream

Making microformats pervasive across the landscape of the Internet will involve overcoming a number of different adoption barriers for both browser vendors and Web developers.

"For the browser, I think the primary barrier to entry is figuring out how to present this new type of information to the user," IBM's Kaply said. "Microformats are not pervasive on the Web, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to dedicate large portions of the browser UI to them. Operator contains a lot of different UI elements for accessing microformats, but I don't think any of them is perfect."

On the Web developer side Kaply thinks that the primary barriers are knowledge and tools. To make it easier to implement, there needs to be microformat creation as an integral part of all Web development tools. Kaply noted that though there are some tools available today, including extensions for Adobe's Dreamweaver there is much more work to be done.

Even with the continued efforts of developers and browser vendors, microformats might not ever become as mainstream and as common as basic hyperlinking.

"It's not clear that anything on the Web can become as common as basic hyperlinking, since those are the fundamental connections on the Web," Technorati's Çelik said. "Most microformats in fact make use of hyperlinks, so even as microformats become ubiquitous, they add more hyperlinks to the Web."

As microformats continue to be built into publishing tools like blogs and as more GUI/WYSIWYG editors support creating microformats for people, events, etc. just as they support creating hyperlinks, Çelik expects that we'll see even more microformats in content.

"Every month, sometimes every week someone launches a new tool or open source library that uses microformats," Çelik said.

For example Çelik noted that last month both Plaxo and Pownce released open source social network portability code and services that use and publish microformats. This month an independent developer already launched a microformat parsing service called Optimus.

With all that activity and if there is a move toward making it easier to implement, microformats may well soon truly be everywhere online. "Once adding a microformat to your blog post or wiki is as easy as adding a hyperlink, microformats may very well approach the ubiquity of hyperlinks."