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Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0
vBulletin Book Store > vBulletin books beginning with M
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Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 |
Author: John Allsopp
Published: 2007-03-26 |
List price: $34.99
Our price: $23.09
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Usually ships in 24 hours
As of: August 07th, 2008 07:15:13 PM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 A missed opportunity
Microformats are a great idea with a not so great implementation (IMHO). This book tries to explain what microformats are and how to use them. But John Allsopp keep getting lost in all sort of marginal details without never going to the point. The book is missing: (1) a chapter with a clear syntax for the most common microformats, (2) a perspective view of the evolution of MF and their relevance for the web and the final users. John waste pages and pages explaining all sort of irrelevant details such as how to make a frame with rounded corners using CSS (showing us a very obsolete technique) and similar off-topics. The impression is of an author working with the main concern of generating enough pages not to invalidate the contract with the publisher.
 review of Microformats: Empowering your markup for web 2.0
great book on the proper use of html and css and then further why we need microformats and how to use them.
Much better than I expected
Most of the buzz I heard around Microformats has been just that - noise. This book was the first time I read solid reasons to begin incorporating Microformats in my markup. He does a great job of explaining theory, use and then providing use examples for the various formats - and I also appreciated his showing css concepts for styling the information even if on first glance it seemed a bit off topic. I still feel completely undersold on the XFN concept - neat for blogs but for corporate development just not so useful - but I recommend reading the chapter anyway to pick up a few concepts he hides in there. Overall definitly worth buying and reading.
 A Strong Book with a Bit of Excess
I thought this was a good book, that definitely gave a good overview of Microformats, and acts as a fairly good reference. I did, however, feel that it was substantially longer than it needed to be, covering a number of topics that I feel would be second-nature to most people who would be interested in this book. I didn't feel a need for fifty or so pages throughout that go over the fundamentals of standards-compliant xhtml, or little css tricks for layout and the like. It's not that I didn't feel these sections weren't well written -- just that I think most people who are looking for a book on Microformats are probably well past wanting a basic primer on xhtml/css methodologies. I would have preferred a 40 page book that just dug into the meat of Microformats.
My final assessment is that this is a good book -- John certainly knows his stuff -- but be prepared to have a fair amount of rehashing of simple concepts.
Excellent Resource
Few books actually give the why and reasoning behind various technologies. For instance, pick up that latest Java book and what do you find? Someone's simply dumped the API, but that does really tell you about how to use the information. Such things bug me.
Microformats doesn't bug me. Infact, I was happily surprised by it.
In a nutshell, in addition to using class information on an HTML tag as a means of using CSS for presentation, you can also use it for conveying information. Microformats are well thought out nested elements that provide human readable text, but machine processable content. The idea is fairly trivial, which is why it works so well.
Turns out there are all kinds of wonderful applications, and this book walks you through the problem that's being solved, shows why the solution is elegant, gives you plenty of examples, and then demonstrates how to not just create, but to detect and read Microformats.
As an added bonus, the book touches on all kinds of little developer tools, tricks, and browser extensions that just are plain usable.
In short, the book over delivers without being verbose.
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