Hello,

Not sure to whom I should address this request, but I'm very excited
about the Blogger Beta and that it represents an open opportunity to
add support for microformatted content.

You can read more about microformats at microformats.org, but to
summarize, microformats are community-developed standards for
identifying certain kinds of information in webpages using your typical
HTML tags and classes.

In particular, this is my wishlist of microformats that I would love to
see Blogger support:

* rel-tag: okay, you already took care of this one, so kudos!

* XFN: WordPress already supports this, and it's especially useful for
representing lists of friends in blogrolls. More at
http://gmpg.org/xfn/.

* rel-me: from the XFN family, being able to link to other pages on the
web using rel="me" creates an informal means of "claiming" other places
where I publish online. Read about Ma.gnolia's addition of rel-me:
http://ma.gnolia.com/blog/2006/08/21/a-microadvance-in-our-microformats

* hCard: marking up personal profiles in hcard means that if I add
personal contact details, people can click a link to add me to their
address book without any extra typing. I've done this on my main blog:
http://factoryjoe.com/blog/hcard. Click the "Add me to your address
book" link will convert the HTML content in that page into a .vcf file
that most address book programs can recognize.

* hCalendar: In order to make it easy for my readers to add events that
I've blogged about to their calendars (Google Calendar or others, like
iCal), I can use hcalendar to mark up this information with a link to
add the events to their calendar. Here's an example:
http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2006/08/23/events-that-you-should-be-at/.

* hAtom: This one is fairly simple to implement since you're already
classing most of this information already. hAtom uses element names
from Atom as class names. This allows people to subscribe to blogs
directly, without the need to subscribe to RSS. You can read more about
this here:
http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2006/08/02/chris-cascianos-microformats-ha...

Though the benefits may not seem immediately obvious to supporting
microformats, the amount of effort required to add support is fairly
minimal compared with other, more substantial features. Furthermore,
our community (microformats.org) would be happy to help with the
process of adding microformats support to Blogger, validating your work
and providing guidance along the way. Our initiative is also not a
commercial effort; rather, it represents the work of a large,
distributed, grassroots community that wants to build out the value of
the "lowercase semantic web" and to make data storage in web pages a
reality.

In some respects, we are at a chicken-and-egg crossroads
(http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2006/05/31/egg-meet-chicken/) but the more
support that we see for microformats in the wild, the more tool makers,
publishers, browsers and other applications (web- and client-side) will
reap the benefits of this effort to modernize the web, incrementally
building upon the existing infrastructure.

Thanks for your consideration and please let me know if there is any
way that I can be of service.

Chris

I would like to propose the following variables for blog posts [1]:

- Published date and time in ISO format [2].
- Published date and time in human-readable format.
- Last modified date and time in ISO format [2].
- Last modified date and time in human-readable format.

If a comment can't be modified after it's initially published, the last
two would only be applicable for blog posts.

I believe this will be handy for general metadata and scripting
purposes, maybe even stretching outside of microformats.

[1] http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=47270#posts
[2] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3339.txt

I've added our endorsement [1] to Chris's letter. I've also made the
explicit case for using hAtom [2] in new Blogger templates:

    * hAtom identifies almost all the commonly used elements in blog
posts.
    * standardizing around hAtom class names will make it easier for
designers to modify and understand templates. Actions, such as "print
this post" can use a shared printing CSS file, as it will inherently
understand how all posts are structured.
    * standardizing around hAtom class names will make it easier for
search companies -- such as Google! -- to understand that a page
contains blog posts, what part of the page conatains the blog posts and
what isn't part of the blog post. This will make search results within
blogs more accurate by giving the ability to ignore "incidental
matches" where one blog posts matches but (for example) some other
non-important term in the sidebar matches also
    * standardizing around hAtom class names will make it easy to do
"reblogging" -- that is, quote part of the content of one blog post
into another post -- thus making it easier to create blogging
communities and blogging conversarions
    * as new templates tend to be created from existing templates, the
greatest benefit for adding hAtom to Blogger templates would be to do
this as early as possible in the development/roll-out cycle

hAtom is the standardized microformat way of naming blog post elements
using CSS names, identifying most commonly used elements including the
items Charl mentions in his post.

Regards, etc...
David Janes
Founder, BlogMatrix
http://blogmatrix.blogmatrix.com

[1] http://blogmatrix.blogmatrix.com/:entry:blogmatrix-2006-09-04-0000/
[2] http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom