Microformats - please explain the hCard
I was listening to a few podcasts and got into the idea of Microformats. The guys at boagworld and other pros say it is so easy to implement, and is an especially neat way for info-laden address book type stuff to be embedded into your site.
I found a site that explains the hcard, and it sounded very simple, or so I thought. But if I publish the completed script at this site, all I get is a link to my name and my address just sitting there on the page. Hardly a nifty embedded solution!
Is there more to it? Is it obvious to programmer types that you would have to do more than use the script and paste it into a web page - like you have to define with CSS or some other code behind the scenes in a style sheet, how the hCard looks? Or what?
Thanks for any help from a noobie who would like to embrace some new ideas.
Abhishek Reddy posted this at 17:30 — 2nd November 2006.
He has: 3,348 posts
Joined: Jul 2001
The hCard is effectively ordinary XHTML. You would indeed apply CSS to make it look like you want. So at a superficial level -- visually -- there's nothing of interest.
What is embedded, however, is semantic depth, since you're describing your information in what should be a standard way. Clients such as search engines or downstream scripts/programs can read into your hCarded text, identify what's what, and hopefully do useful things with it.
A hCard is as much like a card as a cascading stylesheet is like a sheet of paper. It's a poor simile; there's not more much to it than bits of code.
pisstaker posted this at 23:29 — 2nd November 2006.
They have: 63 posts
Joined: Sep 2006
Thanks for the explanation.
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