Microformats or “why browsers are stupid”
If you see a link on a web page and click it, your browser opens the linked site. This is because your browser “understands” what a link is.
Now if you encounter a real world mailing adress your browser can not by default distinguish it from any other text on the page. If you want to add it to your adress book or look it up on a map you have to copy and paste it into another application. For the same reason you can not click on a telephone number to call it or automatically add events to your calendar of choice.
The content on the visible web is mostly designed to be understood by you (a human) but not by your browser (a machine). So for information to travel between sites and applications you have to do a lot of silly work (going back and forth, copying, pasting, etc).
This is where microformats come in. They add an additional dimension to the data - one that is not intended for you, but for the programs you use. So if an application makes the effort to mark up content with microformats other applications can suddenly make sense of it.
We have just made this effort for Permatime.com (see my original Permatime announcement). It still allows you to share any point in time with people in different time zones but if you use an add-on like operator for Firefox and navigate to a Permatime like this it will allow you to add the event directly to your calendar application. No silly copying and pasting required and time zone conversion is of course taken care of (this is Permatime after all).
More and more sites support microformats - and more and more applications understand them. I am pleased that our little contribution makes it so easy to create a hcalendar microformat. It’s the future :)
(If you are stuck with IE try Oomph for some microformat bliss)
