Talk:Microformat

GA Review

GA review (see here for criteria)

1. It is reasonably well written.

   a (prose): b (MoS):

2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.

   a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):

3. It is broad in its coverage.

   a (major aspects): b (focused):

4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.

   Fair representation without bias:

5. It is stable.

   No edit wars etc.:

6. It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate.

   a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):

7. Overall:

   Pass/Fail:

Comments:

1. The Microformat-logo.png needs to have its fair-use rationale filled out — specifically it needs to have the "Article" and "Portion" sections filled out.
2. Encyclopedic articles should not use slang ie. don't call it "the web" (in the lead, for example) and some text is a bit too colloquial for an encyclopedic. Example from the lead: "Current microformats allow the encoding and extraction of events, contact information, social relationships and so on." I fixed up another one in my tidying of "Technical overview" if you want to see what I mean. One that I did not correct (because I was not sure how you wanted to phrase it) was "the whole thing," a very vague and unencyclopedic term, under "Example"
3. Many statements require a citaiton:

   "Most of the existing microformats were created at the Microformats.org wiki and associated mailing list, by a process of gathering examples of web publishing behaviour, then codifying it. Some other microformats (such as rel=nofollow and unAPI) have been proposed, or developed, elsewhere." (Background)

   Anything in the the "Technical overview" section that is not common. For one example "Other, optional, hCard classes also exist."

   Redlinks under "Specific microformats" (and, if you're up to it, all of them – but this is not mandatory as the reader can click on the Wikipedia link to verify their existence)

   All of the Proposed microformats

   Most of "Uses of microformats"

   The "Intellectual property" section

4. I think there needs to be a bit more stating the obvious to make the article a bit more accessible to readers unfamiliar with the terminology that you use. Technical terms, even those with linked Wikipedia articles, should be briefly explained, in no more than a sentence if possible, for the layman. Alternatively, you might want to create a subsection under "background" that states the obvious for a completely oblivious reader.
5. The subsection "in-context examples" should be moved to the "See also" section
6. The prose under "Technical overview" needed some tidying up, which I took the liberty of doing myself, but this sentence "For example, in the text "The birds roosted at 52.48,-1.89" is a pair of numbers which may be understood, from their context, to be a set of geographic coordinates." makes no sense. I get what you're trying to say, but perhaps you should reformat it rather than myself, so make sure you get the exact idea across.
7. Be careful of using words that create a subjective time frame. For an example from "Example," "It is now possible for software..." the now of now will not be the now of 100 years from now. An objective time frame must be established, for example, "Since the early 2000s" or something like that.
8. All references must conform to citation templates (Ref #6 is an excellent example) or similar formats.
9. Paragraphs do not consist of one or two sentences. All one or two sentence paragraphs must be merged with surrounding paragraphs.
10. The "Uses of microformats" section is too small and should either be expanded or merged with "Specific microformats" to create a larger "Forms and uses of microformats" or something similar.
11. The "Evaluation of microformats" section needs to be revamped for many reasons, the most pressing being that there are too many sub-sections with too few details. "Accessibility," for example, is only one long sentence!

Also, and this is not mandatory for a GA pass, but the citation templates should be employed horizontally, rather than vertically, to make it easier for editors working on the article. When a reviewer encounters minor problems, the article may be placed on hold for a period of up to seven days. In this case, however, the overall feel I get from this article is that it reads like more of a technical manual than an encyclopedic article, not to mention that it has a large host of problems. While I feel that it might be possible to address these concerns within seven days, I feel that the article and the community would benefit more if some time was taken to shape this article and have it undergo either a Wikiproject specific review, or at least a personal proof read after having taken a week break from the final version that you want to submit for future GAN consideration. For these reasons, I am failing the article for now. If you feel that this review is in error, you make seek a good article reassessment. Thank you for your work thus far. Cheers, CP 03:47, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

"sometimes abbreviated μF or uF"

I thought abbreviations are supposed to be easier to write/type. I don't know about you, but I don't have a μ key on my keyboard. I just searched microformats.org for "μf" and many results from their mailing list came up, but no official page. Anyone know the origins of this abbreviation? --Henry W. Schmitt (talk) 05:02, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

The prefix micro-, abbreviated μ, is part of the International System of Units, the modern form of the metric system. Both micro- and μ are derived from Greek. When used in its more precise sense, micro- and μ mean a millionith. Alternatively, they can mean small or little as in microformats. I have occasionally used μsoft, to abbreviate the name of that little company in Redmond, WA. John Harvey (talk) 12:03, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

I am aware of its use outside of microformats. Wikipedia is very silly indeed. -Henry W. Schmitt (talk) 05:47, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes the redirection of μF should point to Farad with an option there to go to the microformats page (the opposite of the way it is now) - changing this now. That use has been around much longer than microformats and is the most commonly-used multiple of the farad. Obviously whoever came up with the idea of using it for microformats was unaware of the existence let alone importance of this abbreviation in electronics. Yerocus (talk) 18:46, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Intellectual Property

This section of the article does not say anything specific enough to be useful (all pages that use microformats are in the public domain?? all microformat specifications?? I suggest rewriting or deleting that part 63.138.96.244 (talk) 20:57, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

The article needs an update

The section in which the article says that Firefox 3 is "going to" partially implement microformats should be updated with current informations. IE8 may need that too.. I'd do it myself, but i'm no expert in the field. Asymmetric (talk) 17:07, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Yes, that is true. I'm also not a Wikipedia expert but I think that it does need to be changed. --Matthew Bauer (talk) 19:42, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

I also noticed that it needs an update. Could anybody provide up-to-date information?— Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.117.19.131 (talk) 18:02, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

The article also makes no mention of microformats2 which has replaced microformats in many places. A simplified processing model and different class names, h-card, h-feed, h-entry, h-geo, etc. http://microformats.org/wiki/microformats2 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.85.61.162 (talk) 13:33, 26 May 2017 (UTC)

The article desperately needs an update

Not much has happened here in years; nor, arguably, at http://microformats.org/ – could microformats be (another) failed software design movement? yoyo (talk) 15:41, 4 March 2018 (UTC)

Plain old Semantic HTML

If PoSH is going to redirect to Microformats (which I disagree with but is understandable) then there should at least be something discussing it on the page. I'll put in a section stub but I encourage someone who is more knowledgeable to flesh it out. FunnyYetTasty (talk) 16:24, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

Microformats under development

I removed this entire subsection as none of the listed microformats appear to be undergoing active development. They haven't been touched in years. If this is not the case then feel free to put back selected microformats. Here is the sub-section of the article I removed:

Microformats under development

Among the many proposed microformats, the following are undergoing active development:

• hAudio – for audio files and references to released recordings
• citation – for citing references
• currency – for amounts of money
• figure – for associating captions with images
• geo extensions – for places on Mars, the Moon, and other such bodies; for altitude; and for collections of waypoints marking routes or boundaries
• species – for the names of living things (already used by Wikipedia and the BBC Wildlife Finder)
• measure – for physical quantities, structured data-values

I am familiar with hAudio and measure, and these are definitely moribund. Not so sure about the rest. HairyWombat 16:06, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

References

External links modified (January 2018)

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Moving the article title from "Microformat" to "Microformats"

Hi,

Microformats is used in every place in its plural form and "s" is always attached to it. It is always used as "microformats" not "microformat".

What do you think of moving this page to "Microformats"?

Thanks, Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 16:25, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

XFN claim to primacy

XHTML Friends Network and Global Multimedia Protocols Group both assert that XFN was the first microformat. XFN was created in 2003, and this page says microformats were defined in 2005. The citations on those pages don't say anything about being first. Apocheir (talk) 20:30, 24 February 2024 (UTC)