hAtom microformat

November 13th, 2005

Microformats are a human and machine readable way of deploying metadata. You add semantic data by adding class attributes and structuring your HTML in a certain standardized way. More on microformats.org or XML.com. I was just browsing through the microformats wiki and I discovered a draft for hAtom. hAtom allows you to structure a weblog in a way which is machine readable, so it would be possible to extract and produce an atom feed from your HTML code.

The hAtom microformat is something I’ve wanted and although it is still a draft, something I plan to add support for. Simply structuring documents in the way that hAtom recommends should make it easy to parse the document. The microformat page contains some examples such as how PunBB could be transformed to support hAtom.

There is also a brainstorming wiki page and stuff.