• Reported by Nate

After learning all about the microcformat concepts as explained by Eric Meyer and Tantek Çelik at SXSW today, my head is all abuzz with ideas. A one second summary: informally formalizing small bits of markup that others can adopt and improve. Examples mentioned were hcard, hcalendar, vote links, and more, but the potential seems vast. Here's what I like about it:

• Puts the "eXtensible" in XHTML by using the "rel" attribute and classes, and not introducing new stuff that won't validate
• Democracy - it wont' fly if it isn't popular, which is true regardless of if you take that into account, and in my opinion the failure fulcrum for a great many techy concepts.
• Informal evolution - many revisions breeds best results over time, but good results immediately
• Tangentally shares the benefits we see from Dan Cederholm's simplequizes, exploration of the best markup choices for a given content type
• Can be used now, simple by design, made for humans, modular

It was also pointed out that there is a tight potential relationship between the usefulness of these informally standardized ways of creating markup and the CSS that could be used to style such things. All of this makes me think that having an easy to reference, and logically organized library of such micro-formats and CSS "themes" to go with them could be quite a useful resource.