No business benefits for microformats

Over the past year there’s been a lot of atten­tion (in cer­tain circles) for “micro­formats”. Essentially, micro­formats are stand­ard­isa­tions of class-values to use in html. The implied bene­fit is that any 3rd party (be it a browser or another site) could eas­ily gain access to that inform­a­tion and be able to do some­thing use­ful with it.

However, aside from a few prac­tical issues, micro­formats are a fun­da­ment­ally flawed idea.

Microformats are an attempt at cli­ent side innov­a­tion. Looking at the his­tory of (x)html, javas­cript and css (the three main cli­ent side tech­no­lo­gies), you can see it’s rife with incom­pat­ib­il­it­ies. The stand­ard­ised ver­sions of said tech­no­lo­gies have also had (and con­tinue to have) very long mar­ket pen­et­ra­tion times (the time it takes for the sup­port of a tech­no­logy to spread among end users).

The funny thing is that these prob­lems can be mit­ig­ated by some­thing very simple; server side innov­a­tion! It’d have a couple of huge advant­ages. First-off, it’d give more con­trol over the user exper­i­ence. Since micro­formats don’t define how they should be handled by User Agents (UA’s, like browsers or mail cli­ents), you have no way of know­ing how your code will exactly be inter­preted by them.

Secondly, it allows you to use more com­pat­ible tech­no­logy on the cli­ent side (html, css, vCards, pdf, you name it). This means it would work, right now, for every­one. Also, espe­cially for sites that use a CMS (sys­tem to man­age a sites’ con­tent), server side solu­tions are a lot easier to implement.

A few examples of micro­formats, and an explan­a­tion why they don’t provide any (busi­ness) benefits:

hCard — Have extra mark-up so you can point to an external site which pro­duces a vCard? Mark-up which might force you to deal with UA’s which may mess up the res­ult­ing vCard because they inter­pret hCards dif­fer­ently? Why not just upload a vCard or have your CMS gen­er­ate a vCard automatically?

hAtom — Making the page itself it’s own feed? So the full, heavy, page can be pinged by feed read­ers all the time, using far more band­width and mess­ing up stats? Are you kid­ding me?

So yes, I do think that micro­formats are not worth imple­ment­ing yourself.

On: Buzz, Code, Worthy • 9th May of 2007 • Comments are closed.