Google Announces Support for Microformats and RDFa - O'Reilly Radar

Description

Google Announces Support for Microformats and RDFa by Timothy M. O'Brien | comments: 4

On Tuesday, Google introduced a feature called Rich Snippets which provides users with a convenient summary of a search result at a glance. They have been experimenting with microformats and RDFa, and are officially introducing the feature and allowing more sites to participate. While the Google announcement makes it clear that this technology is being phased in over time making no guarantee that your site's RDFa or microformats will be parsed, Google has given us a glimpse of the future of indexing. Read this article to find out about the underlying technology and how you can prepare you own content to work with this emerging technology.

What is RDFa?

While Google's announcement today focuses on microformats they will soon release support for RDFa. From the W3C RDFa in XHTML Specification :

The current Web is primarily made up of an enormous number of documents that have been created using HTML. These documents contain significant amounts of structured data, which is largely unavailable to tools and applications. When publishers can express this data more completely, and when tools can read it, a new world of user functionality becomes available, letting users transfer structured data between applications and web sites, and allowing browsing applications to improve the user experience: an event on a web page can be directly imported into a user's desktop calendar; a license on a document can be detected so that users can be informed of their rights automatically; a photo's creator, camera setting information, resolution, location and topic can be published as easily as the original photo itself, enabling structured search and sharing.

Let's take a quick look at a review from Amazon, and see how it would be marked up with RDFa ...

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