hAtom

[mattsches]

Posting a lot about microformats tonight, I wonder if anyone has heard about hAtom? This might seem to be the most redundant microformat of all, but it's one of the easiest to implement. Basically, you simply add some class attributes to your HTML code/template, and that's about it. Special search engines and other parsers can now distinguish blog entries from all the other stuff in your blog without having to fetch your RSS/Atom feed. They just parse your regular source code, but get a lot more information from it. I've added hAtom to my blog (shameless advertising, I know ), but you won't see it at first glance. You might want to install the Tails Firefox Extension though, which enables you to see all microformats hidden in webpages.

I've also applied hAtom to Carl and Matthias' new top-notch 3.1 theme on my local dev blog ... I can put it online for download, if you want

- Mattsches

[carl_galloway]

Mattsches, thanks for the heads up, and please forgive my ignorance, also understand I'm all for standards so making template compatible with formats like these seems like a worthwhile endeavour, but could you give a little more info about how useful these tags are, and roughly how popular you think they are, whether they're being read by any major feed services or rss readers etc. I've never heard of hAtom before and the wiki page doesn't seem to answer my question.

In terms of making serendipity 3.1 avail for download, a few small problems have developed with that template that I'm trying to fix (thanks to everyone for their patience), but in principle I would love to see how different the two versions are. Would you be able to pm me the download location? I promise to look at it pretty quickly.

Carl

[mattsches]

Carl, I don't have any figures about how popular hAtom is. Actually, I doubt it's very widely used at present. However, I'm in close contact with a couple of people who push it, at least here in Germany, with considerable success. It's hard to predict the future use of this standard, but taking into account how easy it is to implement it into existing HTML without breaking anything - adding a set of attributes to certain elements - I'm quite optimistic.

I'll pm you soon and send you a download link. You'll see that I edited only a few lines of the template.

- Mattsches

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

I'm all for adding meta-elements that do not hurt validation or anything else. But it is some considerate amount of work to implement into all templates?

Best regards,
Garvin

[mattsches]

It's definitely a lot of work to update all existing templates, maybe not even worth the effort ... but we could at least encourage people to add hAtom to new templates. I'll try to gather more information about this microformat because we need good arguments in favor of this, or else nobody will want it

- Mattsches