Microformats, what’s the buzz about?

Today Yahoo! Local announced that they are implementing full support for the hCalendar, hCard and hRevies [tag]microformat[/tag]s.

- Microformat?, you ask.
- Semantic web!, someone replies
And once again no knowledge was shared

I will try to give a brief explanation about what it is:
Let’s start by quoting microformats wiki:

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

Basically the idea is to use existing [tag]HTML[/tag] features for tagging up information in a way that makes it easy to extract and re-use in other situations. The best known microformat specification is probably the rel-tag. It’s used everywhere on this blog where a keyword is marked with green, for example [tag]microformat[/tag]. This markup makes it easy for indexing services such as technorati to find the keywords in my text.

Other known microformat specifications are:

• hCalendar
• hCard
• rel-license

Good sources for getting a more in-depth knowledge is microformats web site, from where links to the wiki can be found. You also might want to check out Wikipedias page about microformats.