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After getting a new tool for composing microformats, we now have a new technique for exposing those newly minted microformatted hcards. Jon Hicks has created expose-mf.css as a browser CSS add-on that will reveal hcards inline, as opposed to external to the page, like Tails. While there are some obvious bugs, this technique demonstrates how revealing embedding microformats in webpages can become a great tool for data discovery and manipulation.

šŸ’¬ Comments from the original post

[...] I’ve been playing around with Goplan and really like the feature set so far. One of the invisible features that is now visible thanks to a post by Fred Oliveira is their support for microformats — namely hCalendar: I’d like to take some time to highlight the icalendar integration and microformats support. We’ve been fans of the Microformats project for quite a while, and are working on bringing Microformat compability for events (in the calendar, as well as due tasks) and people. This allows us to provide developers with more ways to export project-related data. For more information on microformats, see the microformats project homepage. [...]
[...] Messina has been jabbering on about microformats forever. I recently got around to asking, “what’s the big deal”? Essentially, the content doesnt change but the packaging does. Formats like RSS, while effective, are inefficient because they require an additional packaging process: the generation of the feed. Microformats take the built in id and class properties of HTML elements and use them for their underlying purpose…no, not to style and format. That’s a secondary use. The primary function of id and class is identify an “object” within the DOM. ID’s for single objects, classes for recurring objects. Microformats exploit these identifiers in such a way that a web document itself acts as the publishing feed…a parser can go through looking for a standardized format for information such as calendar and address book info. no secondary republishing. and, every instance of support means that another developer has to do one less thing in making his data scrape work. [...]
[...] Hot on the heals of Jon Hick’s CSS work, the folks at Left Logic have created a cool bookmarklet for revealing microformats in situ… [...]

Exposing microformats