Microformats have arrived in Firefox 1.5 / Greasemonkey 0.6
When I first heard about Microformats, I immediately was convinced that they are the way to go within the Semantic Web. There just were no practical tools around to display and use them within my browser, which happens to be a recent Firefox on Linux.
Well, there is microformat-find-gm5, based on the work of David Janes, now. Get it while it’s hot!
Background
On Web pages you will often find references to individuals, locations and calendar dates. Microformats are a way to embed these (and other) content elements within a webpage, so a machine can read and process them. This is what the microformat-find-gm5 scripts does. It looks for supported Microformats on a Web page, tags them with little images having a context menu to provide useful functions for the given content. That might be ‘Add to address book’ or ‘Add to Calendar’, ‘Show on Google Maps’ and so on. More and more webpages and blogs are using Microformats, so look out for these little tags…
Download and Installation
- You need Firefox with an installed Greasemonkey
- Then open the microformat-find-gm5 plugin and click ‘Install’ in the Greasemonkey title bar.
References to other Microformat tools
- David Janes’ microformat-find script (http://www.blogmatrix.com/include/microformat-find.user.js) … was used as the starting point for microformat-find-gm5 - it just would not run with recent Greasemonkeys.
- Tails (http://blog.codeeg.com/tails-firefox-extension/) … is display only.
- TailsExport (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2240/) … is MS Windows only and beta.
- Smartzilla (http://www.stripytshirt.co.uk/features/firefox/smartzilla) … does not provide tags within the page or a sidebar view.
3 comments June 5th, 2006