What are the practical benefits of using microformats for every possible thing?

Question

What practical benefits can my client get if I use microformats on his site for every possible thing?

How can I explain these benefits to a non-technical client?

Answer 1

Sometimes it seems like the practical benefits are hard to quantify.

Search engines already pick up and parse microformats. I believe hCard and hCalendar are fairly well supported--and if not, plenty of sites are using it, including places like MySpace. It's the idea that adding css classes and specified IDs make your existing content easier to parse in a machine-readable manner.

hReview is starting to make some inroads, and hResume looks like it take off too.

I heavily use rel="nofollow" on uncontrolled links (3rd party sources) which is actually a microformat.

Check the microformats wiki for a decent starting point.

Answer 2

Overall the site becomes easier to digest for the rest of the internet. The data can be reused, combined, cross-referenced, and saved.

A simple example would be to have anywhere on the site a latitude and a longitude (geo). With Microformats, anybody that searches for that latitude and longitude can be easily referenced to their website, increasing traffic, awareness of that person / company, and allow users to easily save that information. (Although I've encountered little of this personally, this is more of 'the future' of things than it is current. But always good to stay up to date).

A second example would be a business card (hCard) where a browser can easily save and transfer it to an address book, so that just one visit to the site and the visitor has the information saved locally. Especially useful if they're getting hits from a cell phone.

Answer 3

It just means your viewers can share a few generic "formats". You can generalize stylesheets, and parsing mechanisms. Rather than having a webpage consist of one "html document," you have a webpage that consist of "10 formatted micro-documents".

If you need a real world analog: think of it like attaching a formatted invoice, to a receipt, and a business card, rather than writing it all down on notebook paper with your left hand.

Answer 4

Having a micro-format can be better than no format since it lets you save every possible thing in the application.

A micro-format for every possible thing can be better than a standard format only because: it's quicker to create so it costs less and it take less space than some standard formats, like XML.

But all this depends on the context of the application and so you must explain it to the client in that context.