Microformats at the Radio Times
I have a piece of software called Operator installed on my computer, which adds some nice functionality to my Firefox web browser. It looks for things called microformats. Microformats are structured pieces of information in web pages that can describe all sorts of things like people’s names and addresses and calendar events, in a standard way so they can be read by software and not just the human reading the page. Once read, the standard information can be sent to other bits of software, like your calendar or your address book.
This has been a minority interest for some time, pursued by geeks and not really making any impact on the mass market, so I was very interested to see that the Radio Times TV Guide is now including microformats in its TV listings, meaning that I can add my favourite programmes to my calendar very, very easily. It’s been suggested that the next version of the Firefox web browser could have support for microformats built in. As more people adopt Google calendar and other online personal information managers, web developers need to include microformats wherever they can, to get the information out of the web page and into people’s calendars and address books.
