David,
Myself and a colleague were discussing microformats today and we
started wandering off on a tangent about the following.
Would microformats be the way forward to mark defined areas of a web
page for the sake of search engine spiders? When anyone looks at a
web page the instinctively break it into navigation, content,
advertisements etc. What if we had standard names (microformats) to
wrap these areas in to work in conjunction with the sitemaps.org
standard in aiding the spiders to differentiate between the content
area and, say, text-ads area. You could then delve deeper into the
XML file of your sitemap and tell it visit certain pages every day and
then specify which section of that page they should concentrate on.
I'd be interested in hearing if this a good use of microformats and
whether it's worth pursuing.
Something related I started a while back, and on which I am speaking
at IA summit is work on what I have called webpatterns
http://webpatterns.org
It's a pattern language approach to the architecture of web pages and
sites.
My initial thoughts, and some quantitative research into the use of
semantics in this way I published as "webpatterns and websemantics"
late in 2005.
http://westciv.typepad.com/dog_or_higher/2005/11/webpatterns_and.html
This work (which has interested me for years) is what brought me to
microformats, as there are, IMO, many overlaps. In one sense you an
categorize microformats as a subset of a broader pattern language for
web design, focussing specifically on "data" (that's just conjecture
at this stage, btw).
I actually don't think an XML sitemap file really would be required,
because, like hAtom, the pages are "self annotating".
I'd be interested in your thoughts (and those of anyone interested in
ufs)
john
John Allsopp
style master :: css editor :: http://westciv.com/style_master
blog :: dog or higher :: http://blogs.westciv.com/dog_or_higher
Web Directions North, Vancouver Feb 6-10 :: http://
north.webdirections.org
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