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Google. For a while, Google gave you good boy points for including microformats, and they still offer tests and validators [0] to tell you what the crawlers ge

Google. For a while, Google gave you good boy points for including microformats, and they still offer tests and validators [0] to tell you what the crawlers get out of your page. Supposedly microformats would not just give you better SEO ranking but also help Google connect people (like the fediverse) to accounts, so that you could surface things relevant to person by searching for the person. [0] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu...

zerkten 1y ago
If you go back to the time when they were invented, many semantic elements, like article or footer, didn't exist in HTML. People tried to find conventions and efforts like microformats were an attempt to standardize those when the best solution (updating the HTML standard) was difficult. In terms of timing, it's worth looking at the arc of Firefox, WHATWG, the advent of Safari and Chrome, and table use for layout. Google was a driver in practice. Accessibility and better web experiences were important to those involved. The reality was that people interested in this area were at the bleeding edge. Many people still held onto tables for site layout and Flash was still a default option for some in the period when microformats emerged.
- Telemakhos 1y ago
  ARIA and accessibility microformats were separate from the ones the fediverse was excited about (and thus the GP was talking about)—things like hCard for identifying people, places, and things. Accessibility is useful to many people, but hCard et al. were probably never really useful to anybody other than Google. Still, many of us back then were obsessive-compulsive about using them in the hope that one day computers would better be able to understand authoritative information about identities and relationships between identities. I still have microdata on my personal web page.

zerkten 1y ago

If you go back to the time when they were invented, many semantic elements, like article or footer, didn't exist in HTML. People tried to find conventions and efforts like microformats were an attempt to standardize those when the best solution (updating the HTML standard) was difficult. In terms of timing, it's worth looking at the arc of Firefox, WHATWG, the advent of Safari and Chrome, and table use for layout. Google was a driver in practice. Accessibility and better web experiences were important to those involved. The reality was that people interested in this area were at the bleeding edge. Many people still held onto tables for site layout and Flash was still a default option for some in the period when microformats emerged.

Telemakhos 1y ago
ARIA and accessibility microformats were separate from the ones the fediverse was excited about (and thus the GP was talking about)—things like hCard for identifying people, places, and things. Accessibility is useful to many people, but hCard et al. were probably never really useful to anybody other than Google. Still, many of us back then were obsessive-compulsive about using them in the hope that one day computers would better be able to understand authoritative information about identities and relationships between identities. I still have microdata on my personal web page.