HTML5, microformats and next generation search – 3 things which you should probably become acquainted with this year if you work in the area of social media or web 2 development.
Why? Because they are crucial to driving forward their adoption.
Peter Kim recently did some research into Social Media Predictions for 2009 – here is his paper if you want to have a browse. Interestingly, there was little mention of these 3 areas but probably because it was more of a marketing and social paper than a technical “how to” guide.
But these areas are essential to delivering some of the changes predicted in that paper.
Firstly, html 5.
Though the standard is still in development, quite a bit of information has already been released about it. This article provides an excellent snapshot of what we can hopefully expect to see when the standard is finally delivered.
The new set of elements and attributes should go a long way to encouraging developers to produce more semantic, better structured html. And that’s essential for social media, mashups, RSS, enabling user-generated content on pages, providing better searchable blog entries and so on.
Three examples: HTML5 introduces a range of “structure” elements such as <footer>, <nav> and <aside>. This will greatly help developers mark up the content of their pages more accurately for use by search engines, content aggregators and social media tools.
Second example: HTML5 provides various elements for developers to use in place of the ubiquitous <object> element. New elements such as <video> and <audio> will enable developers to more accurately tag content so it can be more easily consumed by other sites, tools and so on.
I also read somewhere – though I can’t see it in the current draft standard – that an element will be provided to enable developers to mark up some content sections as being editable by users. If so, this should result in the explosion of user-generated content on all sorts of pages – basically, “instant” wiki pages. And potentially I guess make it possible for users to narrow searches by “user-generated” content.
Moving on to microformats. Though some may perhaps be replaced by new html 5 elements, microformats give developers the option to provide greater granularity when marking up their content.
This is all good stuff when it comes to making content more searchable and better able to be shared. Many people are probably already familiar with the geo tag for marking up location details of content so that it can be displayed for example of location-aware devices.
You can see some microformats in action if you install the Operator Firefox extension and look at any wordpress-driven blog including this one through the firefox browser. Wordpress comes with the microformat rel-tag inbuilt so that whenever you add a post to a category, this microformat tag is populated.
If you’ve got the extension enabled, when looking at this post have a look at the toolbar and you will see “tagspaces” highlighted. Look at the drop-down list and you will see a list of sites that consume the tags on this post and let you search by them.
Microformats have huge potential for social media, next generation search and content sharing – once they become more widely adopted.
And finally, the 3rd new friend – next generation search.
As .net predicts in this month’s issue, “google’s 10 blue links will soon be history”. This site gives examples of new, more relevant ways of searching.
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