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Here’s an example of microformats in action, illustrating how adding tiny bits of markup can elegantly transform any web site into a structured knowledge source.

On the left of the screen is a page from EVDB, a site that aggregates event listings. On the top is the vanilla HTML source for that page. Look carefully, however, and you’ll see a few subtle insertions, highlighted in pink. These are hCalendar tags, and they provide computers the meaning of each block of displayed text. Paraphrasing:

<class=“vevent”>: this entry describes an event
<class=“url”>: the URL of this event is…
<class=“summary”>: the title of this event is “The 20th National Conference on
        Artificial Intelligence”
<class=“dtstart” title="20050709">: the starting date of the event is… (expressed
         in an easy to parse format) 
<class=“description”>: here’s a brief natural language description of the event 

Note that the hCalendar tags piggyback on existing HTML syntax extensions for Cascading Style Sheets, such as <span> and <class>.

Thanks to the hCalendar tags, EVDB users can already highlight events of interest and import them directly into their personal calendars, in this example Apple’s iCal application. A free Web service, available at suda.co.uk, translates the hCalendar-formatted event listings used by EVDB into Apple’s iCalendar standard. Soon, a Personal Agent might automatically post upcoming events of potential interest. You’ll never again have to kick yourself for missing an event that you just didn’t hear about in time.