Every now and then, a technology comes along that's Just Plain Cool (JPC). Microformats are a little hard to rap your head around at first, but I think they meet the JPC. The basic idea is that you continue to build your webpage using HTML with no special sauce added - definitely not any proprietary special sauce - but by using specific classes in your HTML structure, you indicate that the data you're marking up has some special, standardized meaning. By following one of the many Microformat standards (e.g.: hCard, hCalendar, and hReview), visitors to a page can make use of the "meta" information without needing to dig through your source.

Microformats aren't particularly well supported by the current version of browsers (or, really, at all), but if you're running Firefox then you can install the Tails Export extension and play along (caveat: the Mac version doesn't do export really, just identify). You'll get a nifty little Microformats icon in the status bar of your browser, which will light up as soon as it spots content on the page. We've encoded our contact info in the hCard format, so grab the extension and go take a peek. It's been a bit of a chicken and egg scenario since Tantek first thought them up, but today's big announcement of support from Yahoo! Local seems to be the first step towards mass adoption.

The highly esteemed Jon Hicks has put together an excellent little proposal for adding Microformat support in Safari, which was then followed up by some great design work by Ben Ward in his Microformats in Web Browsers post.

Anyway, I think Microformats qualify as JPC because:

• They're really easily to implement. In fact, they're almost exactly as much work as you were doing before, only slightly different. You don't have to generate a proprietary file format or add any configuration to your web server - just some simple HTML markup.
• Because they're just HTML, you can easily style them with CSS and it means that your CSS files contain some more standardized class names, which makes maintenance a bit easier.
• If the site visitor doesn't have Microformat support in their browser, it gracefully degrades to simple display of the data.
• Search engines crawlers and other web indexers can use the metadata encapsulated in Microformats to get a better and more rich understanding of the content that they're indexing.

Go forth and Microformat! There are handy generators for hCard and hCalendar on the Microformats.org site, so now you have no excuse. We'll be shifting our efforts to adding support in our client projects, so keep an eye on the portfolio section for some more examples. Have you done something cool? Leave it in the comments!