Fra microformats verden, så afholdte Tantek Çelik og Kevin Marks for 4 år siden et banebrydende foredrag “real world semantics” 11. februar 2004. Et par måneder før i 2003 havde Tantek Çelik, Matt Mullenweg, og Eric Meyer lavet XFN (det første microformats). De sidste 6 måneder har microformattet XFN samt også hCard virkelig været i vælten i forbindelse med OpenID og Social graph etc. (via Zeldman)

Silo free living
Social networks are becoming more open, more interconnected, and more distributed. Many of us in the web creation world are embracing and promoting web standards – both client-side and server-side. Microformats, standard apis, and open-source software are key building blocks of these technologies. This model can be described as having three sides/legs/arms/spokes – pick your connection: Information, Identity, and Interaction
DiSo (dee • zoh) is an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of these distributed social networking concepts.

Deres første projekt går ud på at få bygget en plugin til WordPress som gør brug af ovennævnte teknologier.

Mere læsestof om projektet

• Chris Messina (2007) – OAuth 1.0, OpenID 2.0 and up next: DiSo
• Anne Zelenka (2007) – The Next Social Network: WordPress
• Chris Messina (2007) – Ruminating on DiSo and the public domain

Det ClaimID også tilbyder er, at man kan lave en liste af links over sociale netværkstjenester man deltager i. Du kan også lave en liste over artikler, mashups o.s.v. du har lavet. Kort sagt alt der har en URL kan listes. Nå, og hvad så tænker du måske nu? – sådan en liste kan jeg også lave på min egen blog.

Lad os tage et kig på min nyoprettet ClaimID konto. Jeg havde i forvejen myOpenID som min OpenID udbyder. Så det var bare at benytte denne ved login/oprettelse hos ClaimID.

Min liste tilkendegiver at det er mig. Vent lidt, det kan være en anden der har oprettet dette og udgiver sig for mig. Helt korrekt, men hvis du ser ud for to af linksene, så står der “Verified”. Verified betyder, at jeg har tilføjet en ekstra grad af troværdighed til mit link jeg hævder er mit. Den ekstra grad af troværdighed betyder, at jeg har bedt ClaimID om at lave en unik kodekombination for det link – og det ser sådan her ud.

<meta name="microid" content="mailto+http:sha1:02a2e17ca9bf1e07e1c16c84d6eb3e8d7c5dc059" />

Jeg indsætter denne stump kode i oppe i mit head element i min HTML kode på microformats.dk. Jeg beder dernæst ClaimID om at sende en robot ud og tjekke om den kode er den samme (her af ordet Verified) . Hvis nogen skulle have udgivet sig for mig, så skulle de også have adgang til mit domæne med adgangskode. Her i består den ekstra grad er troværdighed. ClaimId benytter sig af microID til at lave disse unikke kodekombinationer. Du kan ikke genbruge ovenstående meta element – du skal lave en ny kodekombination hver gang du vil have et link “Verified”. Bemærk, det er ikke alle sociale netværkstjenester der lader dig have adgang til selv HTML kilden. Men hvis du ser bare et par enkelte links der har verified status fra en ukendt persons liste, så kan du have en vis form for tillid, at det er den rette person han/hun udgiver sig for.

ClaimID og microformats. Hvis du ser under et link så står der “By Me” – Hvis vi går ind og kigger i HTML koden for et link.

1. <a href="http://www.microformats.dk/" class="taggedlink" rel="me">microformats.dk</a>

Så stammer “rel=me” fra microformattet XFN (XHTML Friends Network). XFN benyttes til at beskrive relationer i et link til venner, familie, kollegaer etc. samt også til dig selv (rel=”me”).

ClaimID kan også benyttes til at tilføje venner, kollegaer etc. der har OpenIDs, når du tilføjer en person – så sendes en mail til vedkommende og hun/han skal godkende dig. Først når det er sket så dukker vedkommende op på din ClaimID kontaktliste.
Bemærk, når der tilføjes en kontaktperson – så har du mulighed for angive relationen til vedkommende.

Det er igen XFN der er på spil. WordPress brugere har sikkert set noget lignende som i ovenstående billede, når de har tilføjet links til deres “Blogroll”.

Så hvis du ingen OpenID har endnu så er ClaimID en mulighed at starte der. Samt ikke mindst prøve nogle af ovenstående muligheder. Du kan evt. tilføje mig claimid.com/sorenj på kontaktliste.

[1] Søren: Welcome Brian. The microformats community quite often use this phrase “Designed for humans first and machines second”. How would you explain this concept for web developers and ordinary web users,who never have heard about microformats?

Brian: I like to talk about microformats as “semantic sugar”. Everyone can understand that adding a little bit of sugar to your food you make it taste better. Adding microformats into your HTML makes it “taste” a little better too!

The “Designed for humans first and machines second” is attempting to point out that microformats always take into consideration the publisher first. This means that things should be as easy as possible for the person writing the HTML. There will be factors of 10 more people publishing than writing parsers, so why make it easy to parse at the expense of the publishers? The other big thing this stresses is that data should be for humans, it should be in plain view – you should see it every day through the window of your web browser. Data that is only for machines tends not to be visible to humans in a meaningful way, so we forget about it, we never update it and next thing you know it is completely wrong!

[2]Søren: You are one of the co-authors of hCard, where did the genius idea came from regarding reusing the old vCard specification for hCard?

Brian: I already knew that my target was going to be vCard, so for me i was simply creating a vCard in HTML rather than XML or plain-text. Basically, a good programmer is lazy. It is always a good idea never to re-invent the wheel when ever possible. Using vCard properties for class values was a logical choice, with applications already supporting it, you instantly get inter-operability.

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[3] Søren: First time I did a hCard and then pointed the URN for that web page with my hCard to your “GEO Microformats to XML” tool and a KML file started up my Google Earth, I was very impressed and felt that this were one of the more practical things to do with microformats. Later on, I have discovered that when showing new people microformats in action (on a FireFox browser with Operator) – Examples with hCard and maps (Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Google Earth etc.) is the first thing they think is smart and usefully for them self. Do you have the same experience when you are talking at conferences, that examples with maps draws peoples attentions to microformats?

Brian: Certainly maps are something everyone can relate too. In my presentations I try to show at least one practical and one “far out” demonstration of microformats. Usually, i demo how to take an HTML page, upcoming.org or any other with an hCalendar, then convert that to an iCalendar file.

With the newest versions of Outlook and Apple’s iCal, you can “subscribe” to events. This means that as the HTML pages are updated, your calendar application gets those updates too. This tends to really impress an audience, because we have all probably missed a rescheduled meeting or event due to a rescheduling. HCalendar really scratches an itch that people have every day.

I also like to demo some crazy far out stuff too, just to get people’s minds thinking. Twitter, for example, marks up all your messages as hAtom entries. Each of these entries has a publication date, so there is no reason why it isn’t possible to extract the data and convert it to XML or JSON and have it loads into a timeline or other software. Now we can begin to see twitter posts in relation to each others time distance rather than just as a list.

[4] Søren: Speaking about the upcoming FireFox 3.0 (not talking about the version out now for testers) and the build in microformats detection feature – will this be the breaking point and the big step ahead for microformats? – so we maybe see a success for microformats like the one RSS/Atom have gone through?

Brian: I think having a microformats detection native to the browser will be a big benefit to adoption and awareness. RSS/Atom has exploded for lots of different reasons, but it has taken many, many years! Where I personally see microformats in the browser excelling, is on mobile devices. Imagine if the browser in your phone was microformats aware. Instead of trying to re-type an event using T9, it could be one-click, save to calendar, one-click, call this person, one-click, get directions to this place from where i am standing right now based on my lat/lon of my phone’s built in GPS unit.

If all things were equal between two websites, but one used microformats and the other didn’t, when on my phone i bet you know the one i’d pick!

For better or worse, the end-user doesn’t really care about microformats. If you look at the current Operator toolbar, it doesn’t mention the word “microformats” at all. It is all “action” based. Which i think is good. My parents don’t need to know what microformats are to be able to “save to address book”. The better a technology is, the less of it you see. To most people, FireFox 3 knowing that there are 3 events in a page will just be magic. To any good web developer,they will want to know “how do i get my pages to have those options appear” and will learn more about microformats.

My dream would be that microformats become so ubiquitous that you don´t need to announce that they are in your page, it is just expected. Much like making valid HTML, you shouldn’t be proud and announce to the world “My HTML validates”, because that should be a baseline. It is like telling the world “I brushed my teeth this morning”, so what – i hope you did. If we evangelize enough, microformats will just become part of the HTML you produce on a daily basis.

[5]Søren: I maintain a list over danish web sites which is using microformats (The list does not incl. “rel-tag” web sites). The list is very short. For me it seems like microformats is very unknown in Denmark at the moment. Do you think that microformats can have a some language barrier? I am thinking about ‘classes’ for example are all in english [ like class="street-address" i hCard etc.] So a danish, swedish or finish web developer might thinking what kind of benefits will I get from using english ‘class’ names in my markup? So will we end up with microformats in small countries/languages is only something a few hard core techies is doing?

Brian: Microformats are small re-usable pieces of information, so I´d hope there isn´t much to remember and the barrier to entry is low. HTML is already (for better or worse) in English, so you need to understand what a <p> and <strong> mean relative to Danish. This learning comes from information in your own language, but what you write in is ultimate English. This is why it is important for sites like microformats.dk, microform.at, microformats.biz and others to be localized so more people can learn about what class="street-address" means in their own language and culture, just like you needed to learn what <em> meant.

I don’t think this is a huge drawback for the interoperability. Everything is a trade-off so a unified language for describing things makes it easier to adopt globally so we all know we are talking about the same things. The people I feel sorry for are the British English speakers, it is their native language, but to them all the spelling is wrong!

[6] Søren: You have been an invited expert for the GRDDL working group at W3C. How does the folks at W3C looking at microformats in the picture of creating a more Semantic Web? I have seen that Tim Berners-Lee is quite positive about microformats – (like this twitter message from Tantek Çelik “Tim Berners-Lee just called the microformats wiki “a special holy place ”)

Brian: The W3C is a big organization, but all the people that i have met like microformats – both as an idea and a technology. Their main concern is that microformats can not solve everything, they only cover popular aspects such as People, Places, Events, Reviews and a few others. Whereas with W3C technologies, such as RDF a you can just about describe anything you want, but as with anything there are trade-offs.

Up until a few years ago, there were only two options, HTML and RDF. Two pretty far ends of the spectrum. HTML was for the browser and human eyes, whereas RDF was for machines (and can hurt human eyes if you look at it!).

In recent years we are filling in that spectrum between HTML and RDF. We have the more complex, but can describe anything markup in RDFa or eRDF, and the more lightweight microformats that are easier to implement but have limitations. Then there is POSH and GRDDL to also add and extract semantics. We now have more choices and can select the best tool for the best job on any given project.

I think, from the people i have talked too, that everyone agrees anything which gives more meaning to the web is a good thing. If it has enough structure, then it can be converted to other formats, RDF, RSS, Atom, etc. so that existing tools that people are familiar with can use, understand and act on the data. Microformats do this extraordinary well for very little costs, so it is very much a positive thing for the Semantic Web.

[7] Søren: At the moment you are quite interested in OpenID working together with microformats. Can you tell a little about what the idea is behind all this?

Brian: sure, OpenID is away to authenticate yourself and prove you are who you say you are. Microformats can work with this to further describe more about yourself. For instance, i have a profile page at claimid.com/briansuda with an hCard and i can say that is me, but you just have to take my word for it. ClaimID is also my OpenID provider, so i can also prove that page is me by passing an OpenID challenge response system (username and password). I should be the only one who can answer that username/password so you can trust that i control that page which i am claiming is me. It is a verified way to trust the microformatted data.

I also like using OpenID for lots of other stuff too. Friends of mine have blogs, but don´t want to list a full hCard to the general public. So for the world, you can get their hCard with only an FN and country-name, but for friends to authenticate themselves with OpenID they can see a full hCard with email, tel, adr, etc. So OpenID is a way to white-list friends to sensitive data.

OpenID is a really interesting open technology which compliments microformats well.

I thank Brian Suda for taking his time to answer some questions here at microformats.dk. I really liked the word “semantic sugar” Brian used above and will used from now on (in danish translation). If some danish readers out there are interested in microformats, we maybe could start a danish barcamp etc. Please feel free to contact me regarding microformats.

Some reading stuff from Brian Suda

• Brian Suda (2007) – Microformats: More Meaning from Your Markup
• Brian Suda (2007) – Portable Social Networks: Take Your Friends with You
• Brian Suda (2006) – Using Microformats (PDF book)
• Brian Suda (2006) – Microformats Cheat Sheet (PDF – a must print out paper!)

Did you know that 98.6% of the world’s population is on Facebook? It’s not true, of course, but journalists would have you believe it! Two years ago they were saying the same thing about the growth of MySpace. But in two years’ time, once you’ve tired of Facebook and your friends are urging you to join another new site, will you really want to start from scratch? Do you really want to form all those relationships again? The information is already there; why can’t you transfer it across?

Well, you can! This is where portable social networks come in.

I artiklen kommer han ind på OpenID og i den forbindelse med at flytte rundt mellem de forskellige sociale netværk og tage sine venner med, så findes der allerede et microformats, hvor med du kan beskrive relationerne til dine venner via en URL. Det er med microformattet XFN (XHTML Friends Network). Mange af de tanker og beskrivelser Brian Suda kommer med, er også noget som indgår i prospektet/udkastet til opbygningen af Kbh.dk (går officielt live forår 2008)

Tantek Çelik har skrevet en artikel om hCard og OpenID. Der er det problem med hCard at der pt. ingen måde er at beskrive hvilket køn dit hCard tilhører (male/female/other/Not Applicable). Da man ofte skal angive hvilket køn man tilhører ved tilmelding til et socialt netværk, så ville det også være smart at dit OpenId med hCard angivelse også automatisk vil trække disse oplysninger ind ved tilmeldning (OpenId login) hos det nye sociale netværk du beslutter dig for at hænge lidt ud hos. Det bliver spændende at se hvilken løsning på dette problem, de hos hCard gruppen hos microformats.org finder frem til.

Vores Bibliotek er gået i beta, nævnt hos Underskrift og Esben i dag. Desværre tilbyder de ikke OpenID ved oprettelse af en konto. Så det er et forslag her fra sidelinjen. Andet forslag er mit alter ego ja microformats. Her tænkes på at de forskellige brugerprofiler udtrykkes i hCard, ligesom vi ser det hos Mangospot , MitKBH og Jaiku (og mange mange flere verden over). Nu går Vores Bibliotek først officielt i luften 1. oktober, så mon det dukker op alligevel?
Et hCard udkast sendes gerne her fra.

Jeg har ladet mig fortælle at MitKBH brugte 2-3 timer på at implementere microformatterne, hCard, hReview og geo.

Lidt blogreklame til sidst – Rasmus Luckow-Nielsen fra MitKBH er gået i luften med en ny blog “poso.dk – om portable sociale netværk” i stikordsform vil vi forvente danske artikler om “portable social networks, social graph, Identity 2.0, OpenID”. Spændende og relevante emner, som jeg ser frem til at høre nærmere om.

Q: When can we say Facebook supporting more open formats such as microformats and Open ID.
MZ: we’ve done a lot but we a still a small company, just over 300 employees. There are a lot of interesting things happening in that space, however don’t know when it’s going to be, and as a small company we have to prioritize things. Something for the future.

Kender du det med at for 20′ende gang skal du oprette en eller anden ny konto med brugernavn og adgangskode, fordi en bekendt eller du selv har læst om et fedt sted? Man har en tendens til at helt glemme hvad pokker var det lige jeg kaldte mig det sted samt hvad var adgangskoden. Her er OpenID et bud på en løsning af det problem. OpenID kort fortalt

OpenID means the elimination of multiple user names and passwords and a smoother, more secure, online experience. For businesses, this means a lower cost of password or account management, the opportunity for easier and higher numbers of new user registrations and the elimination of missed transactions because of user frustration with lost and forgotten passwords. [...]
To login to an OpenID-enabled website (even one you’ve never been to before), just type your OpenID URI. The website will then redirect you to your OpenID Provider to login using whatever credentials it requires

I følge Six Apart (2007-09-20) skulle der være over 5000 websteder globalt, der nu understøtter OpenID. Der er 120 millioner mennesker verden over der har oprettet en OpenID konto. Vedr. oprettelsen af en OpenID konto kan det ske mange steder. Jeg har selv oprettet en OpenID konto hos MyOpenID (det er gratis).

Kendte steder, der tilbyder OpenID login kan nævnes Technorati, LiveJournal.com, Ma.gnolia.com og Wikitravel. (liste med flere kan ses her). Prøv selv at oprette en OpenId konto og prøv så logge ind et af ovennævnte steder for at fange ideen.

Jeg bringer OpenID på banen her, da jeg ikkke er bekendt med at nogle tjenester i Danmark endnu er begyndt at tilbyde OpenID login. Hvis det er tilfældet, eller I har planer om det i nær fremtid, så skriv lige i kommentarfeltet.