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Microformats adhere to some basic design principles, articulated by Tantek Celik of Technorati, who appear to be driving their popularity and rapid adoption.

First, design microformats to solve a specific problem, such as keeping track of your friends, or sharing calendar events. Develop them in tandem with an initial Web service or application that uses them. As John Seeley Brown observed, microformats win because they include pragmatics as well as semantics.

Second, start with the simplest possible representation for the problem at hand, deploy quickly, and add more features only when forced by a real application. By simple, think vCard – where a person might initially be represented by just their name, address, and contact information.

Third, design microformats for humans first and machines second. Microformats consist of a little bit of metadata embedded in ordinary HTML – just enough so that a computer can understand the meaning of what is being displayed. In Tantek’s words, information on the Web should be “presentable and parsable”. Microformats do that, as simply as possible.

Fourth, whenever possible, reuse existing well-known standards rather than wasting time and money inventing and marketing new ones. HTML, hCard (based on Microsoft’s vCard) and hCalendar (based on Apple's iCalendar event format - few standards are more well-known.

Finally, microformats should be modular and embeddable. A reservation booking service, for example, might use as input a composite microformat that contained the previously mentioned microformats for personal information and event descriptions.