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ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS2. MICROFORMATS AND THE WORLD WIDE WEBMicroformats are frames for the content. Using them, humans and machines can better understand themeaning of the information published on a web page (Martin). Microformats represent an intermediate stage,as well as a major step towards Semantic Web. Due to the fact that they are destined for humans andmachines both, but mostly because they allow a relatively easy adaptation and processing of existing webcontent, the number of applications, services and programs that implement different types of microformats isquite significant nowadays and it is continuously growing.Following are some of the most important and widely known web portals and applications that useMicroformats: Digg, Dreamweaver (Microformats Extension supporting hCard, hCalendar, XFN, rel-tag,relg-licence), Drupal, Eventful, Facebook, Flickr People and Photos, Google (Chrome, Search, Blogger,Creative Commons Search, Maps), Internet Explorer, LinkedIn, Ma.gnolia, phpMicroformats, Technorati(Contact Feed Service, Events Feed Service, Microformats Search, Search, Tags), Upcoming, WordPress,Yahoo (Creative Commons Search, Local, Tech, UK Movies), and Pingerati (Microformats.org, 2010b).The most commonly used microformat is hCard.Recent browser versions, like Firefox 3.0 have built-in support for microformats while older versions canbe adapted by adding plug-ins like Operator, BlueOrganizer, Tails or Tails Export. Internet Explorer 7 usesOomph as a plug-in for Microformats. Chrome uses Michromeformats as an extension and Android usesMosembro. Other browsers with a consistent effort in this direction are Flock and Safari (Microformats.org,2010a).According to the examples listed on the Microformats’ official web page, the most commonly usedmicroformats pages are:- hCard – stable microformat specification used for representing people, companies, organizationsand places; information published using hCard classes can be exported and saved into different otherprograms (for example a contact can be saved into Yahoo! Contacts);- hCalendar – stable microformat specification used for representing events; information publishedusing hCalendar classes can be saved in digital agendas like Google Calendar.- hResume – draft microformat specification used for publishing resumes and CVs;- hReview – draft microformat specification used for embedding reviews (of products, services, etc)in web pages.As stated by Tantek Çelik, the father of Microformats, in the mid 2010, at five years of existence, overtwo billion web pages used hCard, the most common Microformat (Çelik, 2010).According to ReadWriteWeb, Google stated at the Semantic Technologies conference that it had beenusing structured data open standards such as microformats and RDFa for rich snippets feature and also thatmicroformats were far more common for this feature (MacManus, 2010).3. MICROFORMATS AND EDUCATIONAL PORTALSRegardless of their currently significant use in web portals, Microformats have not raised the same interest inthe educational field. According to a study conducted in the year 2009 (Ermalai, 2010b), only a small numberof worldwide universities integrated Microformats into their web pages, and one could not really speak of adiversity of Microformats - the maximum number of complex Microformats implemented by any universitywas two: hCard and hCalendar. A similar study conducted this year revealed the fact that the number ofeducational institutions using microformats has barely increased and no other microformat has been added tothe two mentioned above. Both of the mentioned studies had as starting point the examples-in-wild page fromthe Microformats official web portal. Examples published on this page were tested in order to establish theaccuracy or the information.The results of this year’s study led to the figure below:388