It seems Microformats are beginning to make the journey from cool-but-geeky-idea to average-user-reality.
Alex Faaborg - » Microformats - Part 0: Introduction
Much in the same way that operating systems currently associate particular file types with specific applications, future Web browsers are likely going to associate semantically marked up data you encounter on the Web with specific applications, either on your system or online.
Alex is a User Experience Designer working on Firefox 3. It is reassuring to see that people who want to design ways to make the user experience fit seemlessly with their experiences outside of the software product’s control are looking at the microformat as another way to do this.
(firefox already works for me as a debugging tool, blogging tool, media player tool and PHP development tool by the judicious use of add-ons. Oh, did I mention ftp tool, social book marking tool and web browser…)
Once a browser adopts microformats, and people start to see simple integrations, like having contact details saved straight to your address book, then we start to see that other people can have ideas for content that should be findable and exploitable.
So what does this mean for self-description?
A greater awareness of the sheer usefulness of being able to toss little bits of information around like a balloon patted from person to person, will prompt people to begin finding new ways to share that info. It’s very tempting to wander off into a bit of future gazing at this point, but I would ask you to think about ways that your collection descriptions can start to live a life of their own, being tossed around the internet and eventually landing up in unexpected places.
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