microformats

Use it and Improve it!

This Tumblr theme implements the hatom microformat. The code for this theme is hosted on github here. Please feel free to add to and improve upon the code in any way you can.

The complete source ready to copy straight into your Tumblr customize page can be found here.

See the README file for further instructions.

Just what are Microformats anyway?

Microformats are a set of open standards and specifications for the construction of (X)HTML that is meaningful to both humans and machines.

Definition from the microformats wiki:

Microformats enable the publishing of higher fidelity information on the Web, providing the fastest and simplest way to support feeds and APIs for your website.

See more explanations of what microformats are, and what you can do with them.

Why Microformats?

Developer1: Now we've all separated style from content, wouldn't it be great if everyone used a standard structure and set of class names in their markup?

Developer2: Great idea! That will save me having to invent new ones. Let's also make those class names as semantically meaningful as possible.

Developer1: Good thinking! This will make our code instantly meaningful to other people.

Developer2: Absolutely, and all these standardised, semantic class names will also make our content more accessible to machines!

Developer1: What shall we call this set of standards?

Developer2: How about microformats?

Developer1: Perfect!

Developer2: What should we do when there's no existing microformat for the particular kind of element we are marking up?

Developer1: In such cases I think we should use Plain Old Semantic HTML.

Developer2: Ah, you mean just use a class name that's as semantically meaningful as possible?

Developer1: Exactly! Rather POSH don't you think?

Developer2: Ha! This is so cool! So many benefits with no extra effort!

http://microformats.org/

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.

"Man who stand on hill with mouth open will wait long time for roast duck to drop in."

Confucius BC 551-479, Chinese Ethical Teacher, Philosopher

Extracting meaningful content from hAtom formatted markup

Thanks to the hAtom format, the content of tumblogs using this theme can be extracted programatically directly from the XHTML. There are some limitations due to the way tumblr publishes audio and video content. I would have liked to have implemented the hAudio format for audio posts but this is not currently feasible.

Here are some links to hAtom to Atom transformers that do a great job of extracting this hAtom formatted content:

microformatic
Optimus
Almost Universal Microformat Parser (does a better job with the video entries)
tramsformr
buzzword

Also well worth trying out are these two addons for Mozilla Firefox that help you locate and extract microformats while you browse:

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]