This year the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006 Web site is making use of microformats.
Microformats, as defined on the Microformats Web site, are:
... designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging).
Throughout the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006 Web site there is contact information for people involved with the workshop (speakers, committee members, session chairs, etc.) Some of this information has been marked up using hCard tags.
hCards, as defined on the Microformats Web site, are:
... a simple, open, distributed contact information format for people, companies and organizations, which is suitable for embedding in (X)HTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML.
When viewing marked up hcards on the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006
Web site you will definitely notice one icon and may in fact notice two. The green and
brown logo (
) links to this page while the blue and black logo (
)
transforms the hCard into a vCard.
e.g.
Marieke Guy
Web site: Marieke Guy
Email: m.guy@ukoln.ac.uk
Phone: 01225 385105.
At the moment you will only be able to see the blue and black logo under the contact information if you use a Firefox browser and have a script (such as Convert hCard) installed on your machine.
You can also use a hCard transformation service to change the hCard into a vcard. If you go to Suda and enter this page's URL in the second box labelled hCard-2-vCard and click generate Vcard you will create a Vcard for Marieke Guy.
Technorati also have a beta hCard transformer service.
The Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006 Web site also carries a wide range of event information. Some of this information is fairly general (such as the date and place of the workshop) and some is more specific (such as information on plenary talks). The intention is to mark up this information using hCalendar
hCalendar is defined on the Microformats Web site as:
... a simple, open, distributed calendaring and events format, based on the iCalendar standard, suitable for embedding in (X)HTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML.
To view hCalendar information begin by looking at the start of the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006 home page.
Again you can use a transformation service to change the hCalendar into an iCalendar. If you go to Suda and enter the URL of the page in the first box labelled hCalendar-2-iCalendar and click generate iCal you will create a iCalendar for the workshop.
One easy way to view and validate marked up microformats is by installing the Tails extension for Firefox.
So, for example, once the extension has been installed the committee page can be viewed as shown below.
Phil Wilson will be running a parallel session entitled Exposing yourself on the Web with Microformats! during the workshop.
Please note that the page on the plenary talk on What Does Openness Mean to the Web Manager? and the workshop session on Web 2.0: Addressing Institutional Barriers provide examples of pages containing hCard and hCalendar entries.
It will be important to ensure that time fields are encoded correctly e.g to ensure that British Summer Time is correctly processed. The following test cases are provided.
The following table appears to contain the correct formats for the date and time.
| Markup | Display | ICal value | Tails output | Google Calendar output | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1A | 20060614T151500Z - 20060614T164500Z | Example 01 Wednesday 14th June 16.15-17.45 | 4:15pm - 5:45pm 6/14/2006 | ||
| 1B | 20060614T151500Z - 20060614T164500Z | Example 02 Thursday 15th June 16.15-17.45 | 4:15pm - 5:45pm 6/14/2006 |
The following data can cause problems:
| Markup | Display | ICal value | Tails output | Google Calendar output | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 20060614T161500 - 20060614T174500 | Example 03 Wednesday 14th June 16.15-17.45 | DTSTART:20060614T161500 DTEND:20060614T174500 |
5:15pm - 6:45pm 6/13/2006 (!) | |
| 2 | 20060614T16:15:00 - 20060614T17:45:00 | Example 04 Wednesday 14th June 16.15-17.45 | 5:15pm - 6:45pm 6/13/2006 (!) | ||
| 3 | 20060614T16:15:00Z - 20060614T17:45Z | Example 05Wednesday 14th June 16.15-17.45 | 5:15pm - 6:45pm 6/14/2006 |
Note that the example makes use of the Firefox Tails extension and the Google hCalendar Greasemonkey script.
Last modified: 17th July 2006
