Microformats: what are they, and why should we use them?

Copying yet another soccer schedule or flight itinerary into a computer's calendar by hand, one field at a time, will eventually drive anyone insane. The Web made exchanging documents easier, but there's been little progress for data.

There is hope - with the emerging hCard and hCalendar microformats, data can flow seamlessly from web pages into my calendar and contact tools. The trick is to encode the data in HTML, using the class attribute to say what it is. But wait... why encode this in HTML? Why not use an XML vocabulary for contacts and calendar information? Or Semantic Web technologies like RDF and the Web Ontology Language (OWL)?

In fact, all of these have been tried. In this session, we'll explore what works and why, looking at both the social and the technical factors that will determine what we use in the future and how we use it.