EdinburghMenus.com now supports microformats.

In brief, microformats consist of snippets of information hidden within the code of a webpage written in a way that computers can understand. Software can pick up on this hidden code and identify information about reviews, businesses and people mentioned on a web site. The idea is that this will make it easier to generate links between different web sites and services and be a way to link up all the disparate information that can be found on the internet.

To be honest, this is of limited use just now, as current browsers don’t pay any attention to this extra information, unless you have installed a microformats extension to a good browser. But hopefully within the next couple of years, microformats will be as ubiquitous around the web as RSS feeds are today. The next major release of Firefox is going to incorporate support for them and it can only be a matter of time before the major search engines wise up too.

EdinburghMenus.com now uses the hReview standard for all reviews on the site and all business listings have an hCard hidden behind the scenes. Reviewers are also tagged with an hCard, but don’t panic — we don’t give away any more information about you via microformats than is already available on screen.

Apologies non-geeks — I’ll try to make the next post more interesting!

This entry was posted on Monday, July 9th, 2007 and is filed under development, new features.
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