“Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0” is a clear and easily written introduction to microformats and semantic HTML for beginners and solid reference work for advanced microformat users, written by John Allsopp.

The very first book on microformats and I finally got my copy! I played with microformats before and have a bit of familiarity with the semantic web idea so not all concepts in the book were as useful to me but I would still recommend the book to more experienced web developers. Normally I’m not an IT book minded person; these things tend to get hopelessly out of date before you find the time to read them. Especially with microformats, a newer concept to the web with lots of draft specifications, the book seems a dangerous field when you want to write something that lasts.

It is the reason I bought John Allsop’s book (sells for a very reasonable £17 or ≈ €24): a trustworthy reference on my desk for when I see a possible microformat candidate popping up in my HTML code. With the examples online there is always that “is this really the right way?” question. With a book you know that at least someone read the specifications (as John claims in his book) before writing it down. Especially when your technical editor is a guy like Brian Suda and you have a chance to interview Dan Cederholm! By the way, did you know you can markup multi-dimensional tables in HTML? I didn’t.

An informative read for technical and non-technical readers alike, John’s “microformats and paving the cow paths” comparison is the most beautiful microformats definition I’ve seen.

I would rate it 4 out of 5 stars. I need a complete hReview post for this one, don’t I?

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Author

John Allsopp

ISBN-10

1590598148

ISBN-13

978-1590598146

Book reviewed on October 24^th, 2007, as hReview (version 0.3). Updated this blog post source to the newer microformats2 h-review specification in 2020.