[HN Gopher] Microformats - building blocks for data-rich web pages
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Microformats - building blocks for data-rich web pages
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 72 points
Date : 2025-10-04 13:58 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (microformats.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (microformats.org)
| alganet wrote:
| This is dead. If you need something similar, better look for RDFa
| instead.
| turnsout wrote:
| In an era of LLMs, do you think RDFa still has a place?
| jgalt212 wrote:
| Only if you think the transition to a zero-click Internet is
| happening too slowly.
| turnsout wrote:
| Is zero click a real problem for actual site owners, or is
| it just affecting SEO job security?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I imagine it is if the content you paid for to create and
| host is only monetised by a search engine.
| jerven wrote:
| RDFa/Microdata is more interesting for people whom sell
| objects instead of content. e.g. marking up that a page
| is about a kitchen cabinet that is 60cm wide and in the
| color white might lead to more sales in the long run. As
| people whom are looking for 60cm wide cabinets might get
| to your page instead of one about one 36 inch wide.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| That doesn't sound relevant to zero click.
| turnsout wrote:
| It sounds harsh, but maybe that was never a good business
| model in the first place. And I fully realize that this
| includes most news sites. In order for the web to grow, I
| think we need to figure out some way to get past banner
| ads as the only way to make money. It's been 30 years.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It would be good to know why it was never a good business
| model.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| that's a terribly naive question.
| pixelat3d wrote:
| It is VERY real, sadly
| alganet wrote:
| Whatever relevance it has, it's more than microformats.
|
| I personally think semweb-related technologies could play a
| significant and productive role in synthetic data generation,
| but that's a whole different conversation that is beyond the
| current era of LLMs.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| You can use JSON-LD to cleanly embed RDF into LLM-friendly
| JSON. Not sure if there's a direct Markdown equivalent, but
| the Turtle plain-text syntax for RDF is very simple and
| modern LLMs should be able to cope quite fine with it.
| alganet wrote:
| The purpose of RDF is to enable reasoning ("I'm sharing
| this with you, and I'm also sharing how to reason about
| this thing I shared with you, so we can all reason about it
| the same way").
|
| If you show me an LLM that can take in serialized RDF and
| perform reasoning on it, I will be surprised. Once the LLM
| takes in the RDF serialization, it is a dead end for that
| knowledge: by principle, you can't rely on anything the LLM
| does with it.
|
| In a world of LLMs, it makes much more sense to put the
| semweb technologies alongside the training step instead.
| You create ontologies and generate text from triples, then
| feed the generated text as training for the model. This is
| good because you can tweak and transform the triples-to-
| text mechanism in all sorts of ways (you can tune the data
| while retaining its meaning).
|
| It doesn't make much sense to do it now, but if (or when?)
| training data becomes scarce, converting triples to text
| might be a viable approach for synthetic data, much more
| stable than having models themselves generate text.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > If you show me an LLM that can take in serialized RDF
| and perform reasoning on it, I will be surprised
|
| It's easy, you just ask the LLM to convert your question
| to a SPARQL query, then you sanity-check it and run it on
| your dataset. The RDF input step is just so that the LLM
| knows what your schema looks like in the first place.
| alganet wrote:
| I don't understand how this can work.
|
| Can you make me a quick demonstration using a publicly
| available model and the dbpedia SPARQL endpoint?
|
| https://dbpedia.org/sparql
| tempfile wrote:
| I could never understand why microformats were so popular among
| fediverse people when XML is right there. Seems like unnecessary
| fragmentation.
| phpnode wrote:
| If there's one thing semantic web folks like it's fragmentation
| zerkten wrote:
| I don't think anyone desires fragmentation. It's just the
| reality of the space. People were exploring options but
| didn't have support from the key stakeholders who were the
| browser makers (IE was at its peak) and Google. Firefox and
| WHATWG advanced some of the ideas in time.
|
| People always mention RDF when the semantic web comes up.
| It's really important to understand where W3C was in the
| early-2000s and that RDF was driven by those with an academic
| bent. No one working with microformats was interested in
| anything beyond the RDF basics because they were too
| impractical for use by web devs. Part of this was complexity
| (OWL, anyone?), but the main part was browser and tool
| support.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > People always mention RDF when the semantic web comes up.
|
| There's nothing wrong with RDF itself, the modern plain-
| text and JSON serializations are very simple and elegant.
| Even things like OWL are being reworked now with efforts
| like SHACL and ShEx (see e.g.
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.06096 for a description of how
| these relate to the more logical/formal, OWL-centered point
| of view).
| Telemakhos wrote:
| Google.
|
| For a while, Google gave you good boy points for including
| microformats, and they still offer tests and validators [0] to
| tell you what the crawlers get out of your page. Supposedly
| microformats would not just give you better SEO ranking but
| also help Google connect people (like the fediverse) to
| accounts, so that you could surface things relevant to person
| by searching for the person.
|
| [0]
| https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu...
| zerkten wrote:
| If you go back to the time when they were invented, many
| semantic elements, like article or footer, didn't exist in
| HTML. People tried to find conventions and efforts like
| microformats were an attempt to standardize those when the
| best solution (updating the HTML standard) was difficult. In
| terms of timing, it's worth looking at the arc of Firefox,
| WHATWG, the advent of Safari and Chrome, and table use for
| layout.
|
| Google was a driver in practice. Accessibility and better web
| experiences were important to those involved. The reality was
| that people interested in this area were at the bleeding
| edge. Many people still held onto tables for site layout and
| Flash was still a default option for some in the period when
| microformats emerged.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| ARIA and accessibility microformats were separate from the
| ones the fediverse was excited about (and thus the GP was
| talking about)--things like hCard for identifying people,
| places, and things. Accessibility is useful to many people,
| but hCard et al. were probably never _really_ useful to
| anybody other than Google. Still, many of us back then were
| obsessive-compulsive about using them in the hope that one
| day computers would better be able to understand
| authoritative information about identities and
| relationships between identities. I still have microdata on
| my personal web page.
| paulbjensen wrote:
| I remember this from way back in the 00's as part of the Web
| 2.0/semantic web era. I was a big fan of Dan Cederholm's design
| work (https://simplebits.com - he did the design for the site).
|
| I do like the principle of trying to use semantic html, but I
| don't think that things like this ever got the kind of mass
| adoption that would give them staying power. Still a nice
| nostalgia trip to see it here.
| SigmundurM wrote:
| The IndieWeb people use Microformats[1] extensively for things
| like Webmention[2] and such. Seems quite neat, though maybe I'd
| prefer the tags to be data attributes instead of classes.
|
| [1]: https://indieweb.org/microformats
|
| [2]: https://indieweb.org/Webmention
| nikolay wrote:
| Great idea, always used the markup, but is it used anywhere
| outside of some extremely niche services?
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