microformat

1 7.0

A small piece of code on a web page that helps computers understand the content

noun
/ˈmaɪkroʊˌfɔrmæt/

Texting

: microformato

The latest update to the microformat specifications improves support for event data on websites.

Examples

Including microformat markup only gets us halfway to where Facebook could take event information.

Blog text (25)
Leaving no meta or microformat description on a page, instead leaving it up to Google's bot.

Blog text (8)
Facebook's deployment of hCalendar is just the latest in its series of slow but steadily increasing support for open standards and microformats in particular.

Blog text (25)
Believe it or not, one needs to fix broken links and optimize page code before applying the microformats, which have their impact as well, but, in my opinion, do not belong to the basics.

Blog text (8)
Enter: semantic markup, such as RDFa, microformats, microdata,

Blog text (6)
Any website is an ecosystem where everything is important and interdependent: content, proper HTML, microformats, meta, images, layout—simply everything.

Blog text (8)
Using microformat tags helps search engines better understand the content of your web pages.
Developers often implement microformat standards to enhance the machine-readability of their web content.

Surface Forms

microformat singular

microformats plural

Morphology

microformat = format (transparent) = micro + format

The word is directly built from 'micro-' meaning small and 'format' meaning an organized pattern, so the overall sense is readily recoverable.

Etymology

Microformat combines micro- ('small') and format ('shape' or 'arrangement'), and you can see micro- in familiar words like 'microscope' or 'microchip'. So, a microformat is a small, fixed pattern in web code that gives extra meaning to content so computers can understand it.