Five and Lime

ReadWriteWeb today announced that Yahoo would be indexing Microformats. This is great news in the move towards achieving the semantic web. I came across Microformats when reading Andy Clarke’s book “Transcending CSS” and have attempted to implement then on projects since then. This web site makes extensive use of hFeed, hEntry and hCard.

“But what’s the point of all this extra markup?” ask many of my webby friends. It’s easy to be convinced of the advantages of using Microformats if you read “Microformats: Empowering your markup for web 2.0” by John Allsopp. By applying simple agreed classes to markup we can enrich the meaning immensely, for example using hReview for any blog posts that are reviews. Given that the formats are published and stable search providers can create engines to mine this data and then make it available to web developers to create even more interesting applications. Imagine being able to query Yahoo for reviews on a concert and then aggregating them in your own site. This is one such application, the possibilities are endless.

The following is taken from the article:

The basic idea behind Semantic Web technology is that by signaling what kind of content you are publishing on an item-by-item or field-by-field basis, publishers can help make the meaning of their text readable by machines. If machines are able to determine the meaning of the content on a page, then our human brains don’t have to waste time determining, for example, which search results go beyond containing our keywords and actually mean what we are looking for.

Publishers will now be able to clearly designate content on a page as related to other particular content, as business card type information, as a calendar event, a review or as many other types of content. It will make Yahoo! a lot smarter and should shake up the world of Search Engine Optimization and web publishing, a lot.

It will be really interesting to see how Google and other search providers respond to Yahoo’s move.

Read the full article at ReadWriteWeb: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/yahoo_supports_semantic_web.php