Microformats are out there, living quietly amongst the waves of unformatted, online data. But until the new icons find their way into the field, the general public won’t even know they exist (only geeks view source.)
There’s help though. Microformat readers like Tails (a Firefox / Flock extension) allow you to discover and view microformats embedded on a page.
Because of a FF2 installation bug, I used the Tails extension for a while only as an indicator of which sites were integrating microformats. Yesterday, though, I added some Tails Scripts, and now it’s my new favorite toy.
Here are a few things Tails Scripts let me do:
If you’ve been looking for a good way to wrap your mind around microformats, install this extension and add a few Tails Scripts. It will all make sense (unless you’re using MSIE.)
Update: this extension rolls pretty low. Once installed, look for the microformats icon in the right-hand corner of the status (lower) bar. When the logo is green, there are microformat objects on the page. Click the logo to launch it. Click the logo to make it go away.
2 Responses to “Microformats do exist”
[...] Enabling your blog gives readers more options to discover, read, and share your content. I posted a while back about Tails, a firefox (/ flock) extension that allows users to spot microformats and act upon them (see the post for a bit of explanation.) I use the extension, a few built-in scripts, and two clicks to add posts to del.icio.us, check for related content at technorati, and/or submit them to digg. [...]
[...] The first step to making this useful for all is to format the data. If you’re a developer or publisher looking to learn more, there are a number of resources available to you including the microformats site. I’d recommend grabbing the Tails extension for Firefox as well. Tails alerts you to available microformat data on a page and allows you to view and act on them with a single click (import contact info or events, bookmark blog post, map with Google, etc.) There are other microformat readers available as well, but Tails is what I use. [...]