The WebTeam are currently working on including simple Microformats into key areas of the CCCU corporate web. These areas include the CCCU Home page, the Contact Us page, and the Events page in the first phase. Expansion onto faculty and department news and contact pages will be the second phase.
Micro-what?
Microformats are a way of adding simple markup to human-readable data items such as events, contact details or locations, on web pages, so that the information in them can be extracted by software and indexed, searched for, saved, cross-referenced or combined.
More technically, they are items of semantic markup, using just standard "plain old semantic (X)HTML" (i.e. "POSH") with a set of common class-names and "rel" values. They are open and available, freely, for anyone to use.
How can I see them?
There are several different Microformat readers available for different browsers. First of all, let's cover Internet Explorer 7. IE7 has currently one available extension called Oomph. This Add-on detects and processes microformats in web pages.
In the above example the "tagged" content is displayed in the list view over the page displaying events and contact details. Both of these can be exported directly into your Outlook, Google, Windows Life, Yahoo and/or Apple Mac calendar.
Below, the "tagged" location content is displayed on a map.
There are other solutions for Firefox and Safari including tools like TailsExport and Operator. These again convert the "tagged" content into structured information with the ability to export to various programmes including Outlook.
If you have any questions regarding Microformats or the WebTeam's implementation of these please leave a comment and we'll respond.
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