In the past year, microformats support has been launched and built into products and services by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Yelp and numerous other companies, as well as nearly every new social network website.

Taught by industry leader Tantek Çelik, the workshop will cover just about everything you need to know to get started with microformats.

In half a day you will learn how to add key well-established microformats to your website to benefit your users, help your website’s findability in search engines, and provide a standards based API for web developers.

You will also receive a copy of Emily Lewis' freshly published book (tech-edited by Tantek Çelik) Microformats Made Simple.

Learn both the theory of microformats and the practice of hands-on microformats markup:

• What are microformats? Get a good grounding in the kind of problems microformats are designed to solve... and find out where the limits of microformats are (by design).
• Foundations for microformats. it’s important to understand the value of meaningful markup before implementing microformats. This will get you thinking about how you should be marking up your content using plain ol’ semantic HTML before adding any microformat enhancements.
• Incremental building blocks. From simple elemental microformats that consist of nothing more than adding an attribute, right up to compound microformats that can be mashed up together, you’ll meet them all.
• Smell the microformats. Just as you can develop a nose for wine tasting, you can also develop a sense for spotting which content is just crying out to be microformatted. Once you’ve learned to see these patterns, you’ll never surf the web the same way again.
• Add microformats to your sites. Using a combination of exercises, this workshop will teach you to how to spice up your content with semantic goodness. If you’re up to the challenge and bring your laptop, by the end of the workshop you’ll have added microformats to your site in HTML4, XHTML, or HTML5.
• Powerful user experience enhancements. Add powerful one-click contact info download and event subscription functionality for your users to easily add your site to their address books and calendars.
• Intelligent Search Engine Results. With both Google and Yahoo now indexing microformats and using them to enhance search results (AKA "rich snippets"), it’s critical to make sure your site properly marks up people, businesses, organizations, products, and reviews with microformats for search engines to discover, index, and display better results to users.

The workshop is on Friday, December 4th (2009-12-04), from 1:30pm to 4:30pm.

Registration and sign-in from 12:30-1:30pm.

Refreshments are provided, as well as a light vegetarian lunch from 12:30-1:30pm.