are a set of defined HTML classes created to serve as consistent and descriptive metadata about an element, designating it as representing a certain type of data (such as contact information, geographic coordinates, events, blog posts, products, recipes, etc.). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microformat
Designed to pair with RSS for automatically pulling info from web resources
- these seem to be used to populate data for search engine cards too like recipes, shop items, etc.
in 2023, seems to have been replaced mostly by JSON-LD (Google uses them for “Rich Snippets”)
Problems
- no new formats since 2005 (not flexible to change?)
- accessibility concerns because uses elements that screenreaders dont take into account
from https://blog.codinghorror.com/microformats-boon-or-bane/ - issue is that it overloads CSS classes and is just plain ugly and not very developer friendly
- a lot of this could be helped by a comprehensive type system that is integrated into editors but you don’t get that in html..