Microformats burst onto the scene a couple of years ago and are fast becoming an essential tool for all professional web designers and developers. Imagine being able to integrate all of your web-based contact details, tagged articles, and geographical information seamlessly in web and desktop applications, without having to add anything extra to your websites except a little specialized HTML markup.

Microformats provide a more formalized technology for adding commonly used semantics (such as contact details, location, and reviews) to today's Web. Unlike XML or the semantic Web,...