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November 2, 2005
WebApp Integration Points: Microformats
Not long ago, I went to a talk by Tantek Çelik about microformats. The idea here is that there is interesting value in embedding data formats in XHTML in a way that is compact and easily authorable with existing tools. hCard (an embedding of vCard address book data) and hCalendar (an embedding of iCalendar data) are two that strike me as particularly interesting examples because mail and calendaring apps are so popular, both in the web application and fat client worlds. This brings up various new possibilities of how things outside of a web application can interact with that application's various data.
Some interesting use cases / features I can imagine include:
* Firefox could automagically recognize hCalendar events embedded in a web page and mark them via the UI somehow (perhaps by adding a special border?) . This UI element could then be dragged from the web page that produces it and dropped into Sunbird or Lightning. (There are already extensions and Greasemonkey scripts that do partial implementations of this).
* A similar feature with dragging vCards from a home page, webmail app, or contact app might potentially have another advantage, at least given certain constraints: the CSS and associated imagery could be included with the vCard as (e.g.) MHTML. A suitably smart address book application could then display the addressbook card as an actual business card, with all the esthetic appeal and arbitrary visual information that one can find on a meatspace business card. This might have a positive effect on the adoption and use of vCards in general.
* A calendar client which supported subscribing to remote hCalendar pages could display them either like any other subscribed-to calendar, or (e.g.) in a separate tab with all their original styling and imagery.
I'd be curious to hear about other ideas that folks have for interesting ways that browsers, calendars, mail apps, and addressbooks could usefully handle such data.
One of the things that makes me especially interested in microformats is that they seem to have good deployment characteristics: since the data is embedded in standard HTML elements, most HTML-generating things can be made to generate them without much work at all. As an example, in the calendaring space, eventful.com (formerly EVDB) and upcoming.org (now owned by Yahoo) are already generating their event pages with embedded hCalendar events, and Eventful's event lists are hCalendar-based too.
Posted by dmose at November 2, 2005 1:26 PM
Comments
spraci.com has hcalendar versions of its listings
eg: http://www.spraci.com/listhcalendar.php?parea=sydney&category=all
Individual event pages also contain hcalendar data
....but where are the client apps that can use this format?
Posted by: Mike MD at February 10, 2006 2:54 AM