Tantek Celik’s Better User Experience Through Microformats presentation at An Event Apart in San Francisco outlined the benefits of and existing applications of microformats.
- How can we make better user experiences for users: less pain, faster, empowering, make people happy
- Operator (Firefox plug-in) locates all microformats on a Web page and provides relevant actions in the browser toolbar.
- Hcard provides structured information about a contact
- Hcal provides structured information about an event
- Search engines are indexing microformats. Specifically Yahoo’s Search Monkey which locates 1.2 billion hcards
- hListing can be used to post job listings. Will then be indexed by search engines.
- Most widely supported profile format on the Web. There are more hcard users than users of any one site (Facebook)
- Hcards could be used to enable single field sign-in. Just tell me the location of your hcard.
- Beware of third party authorization systems: phishing problems with roundtrip, enrollment authorization problems
- Anti-pattern: do not enter passwords on other sites. Leverage contact information APIs instead of asking for username & password. We are teaching users to get phished