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Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Google added support for the hCard microformat to Google Maps results

" Today we're happy to announce that we are adding support for the hCard microformat to Google Maps results" said By marking up our results with the hCard microformat, your browser can easily recognize the address and contact information in the page, and help you transfer it to an addressbook or phone more easily."

Firefox users can install the Operator or Tails extension; IE or Safari users can use one of these bookmarklets.


If you are on a Mac, and want to export a search result to your address book, this is how it looks:



Using Microformats in your Maps API application


You can get the benefits of microformats for your own maps applications if you change your HTML to contain the necessary hcard classes. In this simple example, the infowindow have been changed to contain an hCard formatted address. The code for that is below:


About microformat

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging).

It's a clever uses of HTML that add machine-readability to everyday web pages while preserving human-readability. Microformats allow tools to make more sense of your web pages, while not changing the visual appearance for visitors to your site one whit.

If you want to learn more, head over to
microformats.org.


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