Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. Review: Microformats
Iain Laskey enthuses about a new title aimed getting web developers up to speed with Microformats
| Product | Microformats |
|---|---|
| Company | Friends of Ed |
| Web | www.friendsofed.com |
| Price | £23.99 |
| We like | Excellent introduction, semantic web overview, specific information on a selection of key formats |
| We don't like | Nothing |
| Rating | 9/10 |
| Requirements |
One of the hottest topics on the web right now is microformats. Still a fairly embryonic technology, they provide a much needed level of standardisation to the presentation of information on the web making it much easier to build smart applications that can work with the data they hold. There's quite a lot of useful information on websites but this new book from John Allsopp is the first one we've seen that is dedicated to the subject.
Microformats, subtitled Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 wisely starts with an overview of microformats and what they can be good for before moving on to an excellent discussion on the Semantic Web and what it brings to the party.
The bulk of the book then covers specific microformats that have been published. These are categorised such as links, contact information, reviews and so on. Within each example are examples, background discussion and usefully, information on tools that can be used to work with them both when designing your pages and when developing and working with things like data aggregators.
The book also includes examples of mashups that can leverage the power of microformats with some neat examples particular in the section dealing with location related ones. Some even provide sample CSS for formatting and laying out the data in attractive ways which usually involves nice rounded corners on everything.
The next section consists of some case studies to show how microformats have been used in the real world with one involving web guru Dan Cederholm and the Cork'd website and the other being Nate Koechley and Yahoo.
The book finishes off with guidance notes on creating your own microformats and the process involved in getting them accepted as a new standard. Finally, three appendices provide a microformat reference guide, some design patterns and a list of people, tools, services and publishers of note in the field.
Conclusion
When we first saw this book, we wondered how someone could pad out an entire book on what is after all a fairly simple concept. However, John Allsopp has done us proud with a good grounding, some excellent examples and enough pointers to further resources to keep anyone happy. His writing style is really easy to follow and we found it easy to digest huge chunks of the book in a single sitting. What's more, the book left us all fired up and wanting to put the theory in to practice as soon as possible on whatever site we next work on. In that respect, he's done his job and done it well. Highly recommended.
