Today Google announced support for microformats and RDFa markup in a feature they’re calling “rich snippets”. As a participant in the microformats community (particularily hProduct), I have to say, as the English put it, I’m “chuffed”. There are good people putting in a lot of time in and effort to streamline, standardize and improve these markup techniques.
There’s the front-end web developer side of me that is feeling a bit more validated today. In my ten year development tenure, I have had my concerns on front end standards swept aside by the needs of the businesses I’ve worked for, and the hyper-focus by IT and business groups on back-end systems. Maybe I’m overdoing it a bit, but with the ever-growing support for clean code, and data rich markup on the front end, we seem to be at a very deserved turning point.
Note: I would also be remiss if I failed to mention Yahoo! SearchMonkey’s pre-existing support for microformats, as well as countless other apps and plugins…
This is fantastic news! Being able to search through microformats is awesome. Is google products opening up to hProduct search yet?