HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
Microformats
If you look at the
time
tags in the document you will see the following:
<time datetime="2013-10-14">2013-10-14</time>
This could also have been written:
<time datetime="2013-10-14">14
th
October</time>
Or
<time datetime="2013-10-14">October 2014</time>
The important aspect of this tag is that it contains the same information twice. The first ver-
sion of the date is presented in an attribute, and conforms to the ISO standards for dates (and
times if required). The second version appears between the tags, and is the version that will
be displayed to the user.
The purpose of this feature is to provide a machine and human readable version of the same
information. Features such as this are referred to as “microformats”, and are widely used
on the Internet to provide semantic meaning to search engines and other automated clients,
while providing human friendly versions of the same data to humans.
Microformats have not been officially included in the HTML5 specification, although the
time
tag is an example of a microformat. There are several standards for additional micro-
formats, and it is likely that HTML5 will be expanded in time to support these.
