Arve Bersvendsen

Why microformats is a good thing

I could have put the title “I have seen the Microformat Light” on this post, but I won’t. Neither am I suggesting that microformats replaces RDF (which some people have suggested they are trying to).

What I am suggesting, though, is that, given the the opportunity to mark up your human presentable content (read: HTML) with a well-defined microformat, you should. Mostly because writing microformat parsers is extremely easy.

Below is a 13-line hCalendar parser:

function parsehCalendar (doc){
    var evs = doc.getElementsByClassName("vevent");
    var ret = new Array();
    for (var i = 0,ev = evs[i];i++){
      var dtstart = ev.getElementsByClassName("dtstart").length?(ev.getElementsByClassName("dtstart")[0].title.toDate()):null;
      var dtend = ev.getElementsByClassName("dtend").length?(ev.getElementsByClassName("dtend")[0].title.toDate()):null;
      var title = ev.getElementsByClassName("summary").length?ev.getElementsByClassName("summary")[0].innerHTML:null;
      var location = ev.getElementsByClassName("location").length?ev.getElementsByClassName("location")[0]:null;
      var url = ev.getElementsByClassName("url").length?ev.getElementsByClassName("url")[0].href:null;
      ret[ret.length] = new Array(dtstart,dtend,title,location,url);
    }
    return ret;
}

document.getElementsByClassName is left as an exercise for the reader.