Are you using Microformats, RDF, Dublin Core, or some other type of semantic markup?

Question

Do you use any of these technologies? Which of them are current and therefore reasonable for inclusion in the site?

Documentation for anyone seems relatively rare, and the use of any of them is limited, as search engines get better, are they even more relevant?

Answer 1

I use microformats whenever I can. This usually makes sense anyway, since often when I have a block of addresses, I may want to style some elements differently than other elements, and this makes it very simple. This is not like microformats that are hard to understand.

There were several cases where, since I used microformat, I was able to reuse the markup of a certain part of the site somewhere else (how to enable it), and I did not need to change the layout, just the style.

Finally, since I really talked about studying microformats, I’ve gotten better at writing semantic markup and better at calling CSS classes.

Answer 2

I use SIOC, FOAF, DOAP and some other lightweight RDF dictionaries. Today, a popular trend is the introduction of RDF in web documents using RDFa. At this point, the b / w boundaries of RDF vocabs and microformats begin to disappear.

As search engines improve, the need for semantic markup is likely to increase. For example, take a look at microformats and dictionaries that Yahoo SearchMonkey applications can use: SearchMonkey Dictionary

As soon as search engines can understand richer data (even if you simply simply display richer data on the found match at first), people will also get more motivation to use semantic markup.

What additional documentation, in your opinion, is missing and will be useful?

Answer 3

I used all three, but from what I have to say, microformats have the greatest momentum these days. The advantage of this is that it can be easily implemented, even as an afterthought, on existing sites. And although at the moment there are not many consumers of microformats in the wild, this situation is starting to change with the help of the next generation of browsers.

With regard to the importance of semantic markup in general, anything that facilitates the automation of data collection will help create a richer ecosystem of applications that use this data. Relying on search engines for this kind of contextual processing does not take into account the needs of more targeted or niche applications.

Answer 4

We baked microformats in the tools of the publisher that we develop at Praized (mainly in the plug-in tools that we provide to bloggers )

Since the main object in our system is a "place", we thought it was reasonable for us to output microformats.

Answer 5

I use RDFa because it has an important function that allows you to say something, even really bizarre or obscure facts (such as properties of archaeological finds or the number of friends Paris Hilton has on MySpace) and does it unambiguously.

I recently worked on a Search Monkey plugin to display VCal data embedded in RDFa , and came across a couple of cases where you just need to get a little extra data to connect to. They were: connecting the presentation to the slides used during the presentation, and connecting the web page to its main theme so that you can accurately tell what is being discussed.

It’s hard to understand how you will respond to these use cases with Microformats, there is no context or precision in the markup. Over time, I will want to add more details to my RDFa to help different groups of people find my pages and buy material.

Dublin Core is available in RDF and RDFa, but older DC meta tags have similar problems with Microformats and even lower active usage as far as I know.

I agree with CaptSolo that when DC and other metadata standards are an old hat, RDFa is an area of ​​growth. RDFa.info captures every new user as he arrives. I would go further and predict that microformats will die off quickly as more people get "RDF and more RDF tools."

Answer 6

At yahoo, we support RDFa, eRDF, and microformats in page layout.

To find out what we have built, install the SearchMonkey plugin, and then search using Yahoo. You should see infbara below, showing semantic data.

I cannot post links since I am a new user, but go to the SearchMonkey gallery and find "Structured Data Display". His technology.