loving the dot com

Recently it has come to my attention that web monkeys all over the Internet are getting all excited about Microformats and how they are “changing the web” - even one of the developers for Mozilla has started blogging about how exciting it is.

Don’t get your hopes up just yet though, it’s not as exciting as you might think.

The first line from Alex Faaborg’s blog puts it quite well into perspective:

Have you been over hearing people talk about microformats and thought to yourself ‘what are those?

To be honest no, no I haven’t. When I first heard about it I immediately assumed it was the latest semantic craze for web developers, and it seems I was right.

All the hype basically amounts to this: putting your contact information inside (X)HTML elements with standard class names, making them far easier for machines to read.

This is great and all and can be useful for the visually impaired, but lets stop for a second and think about what this means. Spammers are continuously spidering the web searching for better ways to harvest your details, send you more junk via email and sell your personal information for vast sums of money. Along comes Microformats and makes their job 100x easier! Woo! Why bother writing complex code when you can grab the bit you want straight away?

Thanks, but I don’t think I’ll be buying into this great idea. I did find a great hat from Village Hat Shop for Microformat enthusiasts to wear whenever they’re building websites….