It took me a while to see the benefits of microformats, but now I’m definitely there. In October 2006, the UK WSG meeting was all about microformats, and I decided it was too faddy, too niche for me, and that I wouldn’t bother. I regret that now.

The first thing that changed my mind for me was seeing Dan Cederholm’s presentation, Interface Design Juggling. He clearly explained their benefits, and made me think about ways my own sites could be enhanced by them.

The second thing was the suite of tools supplied by Technorati; the hCard and hCalendar convertors are easy ways to display how useful a little bit of standardised mark-up can be.

The third thing – and the real deal-clincher – was the Operator add-on for Firefox. This displays a small icon in the browser which alerts you to the presence of microformats on the page, then allows you to use the data for an amazing array of purposes; adding events to your calendar or contact details to your address book, searching for addresses in online maps, searching the leading social websites for related content… it really shows the potential of the semantic web.

For anyone still not convinced of the benefits of microformats, I urge you to install Operator and right-click on the following paragraph; once you see what you can do with it, you’re unlikely to remain unconvinced.

This post was written by Peter Gasston, who lives in Camberwell, South-East London in the United Kingdom. You can email him at peter@broken-links.com if you want to say hello.