Book Review: Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 by John Allsopp

Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0
By John Allsopp

• Published: 26th March 2007
• ISBN-10: 1-59059-814-8

This is a review of the book Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 that I read it about 2 months ago.

Main Concepts

This section talks about the main ideas I learned from the book. If you don't have time to read the book, these are the main things:

• Microformats is a technology that supports the concept of semantic web.
• It weaves semantic information into standard presentation HTML. It works by inserting specific keywords into standard attributes like rel and class.
• An HTML page with embedded microformats is viewable just like any other HTML page. However, certain tools can parse the page an extract information such as a person's contact information, an event's date and time, or geographic location.
• Tools can process a microformat enabled page with higher fidelity than simple text parsing. Mashup tools, for example, can extract the information and combine it with information from another source.
  
• There are dozens of available microformats.

Review

Summary: Overall, the writing itself was fine. What I didn't like however was the signal to noise ratio. Meaning, after reading this 300 page book, I felt like I got about 75 pages of value.

Details: I was already somewhat familiar with Microformats before buying this book. Perhaps I was not the target audience.

I was expecting a focused treatment of Microformats, but often found I was distracted by the supporting material, e.g.:

• There are many pages spent on CSS styling of microformats. For example, pages 150-160 are devoted to styling an hCard microformat so that it has rounded corners.
  

This may be ok, if this is what you are looking for. But I was looking for a more focused treatment of the subject.