Microformats: Reuse, don't reinvent

Orbitz engineer Mark Meeker has an introduction to microformats with examples


This is one of the best introductions I have found.

I found this Even Bill Gates wants you to use Microformats.

After some reflection, it seems that building an open source object model based upon hCard for people and organizations, hCalendar for events and rel-tags could be useful for many projects. How often do you end up reinventing classes for people, addresses and so on? With rel tags, you could define all sorts of relationships between people and institutions: you can add 'subsidiary', 'employee', 'retailer' and build all sorts of models for a wide range of business needs. If there was a simple object model, with some basic implementations in a few key frameworks, you could start coding from that rather than from scratch. This would also be useful for learning and comparing frameworks. Presumably, you could get a REST implementation, an XHTML view, and a WS-* web services almost free. You would also get the services in a format that would help others build mash-ups with your data.