Web Designers' Review of Books

The first book I picked up on Microformats, John Allsopp’s Microformats: Empowering your Markup for Web 2.0 basically suffers from one thing: it was published in 2007. That doesn’t seem all that long ago, but this has three consequences:

• Apparently few enough web developers were on board with semantic markup at that point that the author spends a whole chapter on it.
• CSS was new enough that for each Microformat described, there is a section on styling that format. This makes the book a lot longer than it has to be.
• Some of the information is out of date, such as the recommended way to mark up dates and times: it describes the <abbr> design pattern, but not the <span class="value-title"> design pattern.

Good things about this book

Microformats has an excellent index and several useful Appendices, including succinct summaries of each format described, along with related examples, tools, and services.

Conclusion

If you’re certain you want a book on Microformats, I recommend checking out the more recent, slimmer Microformats Made Simple.

View Microformats on Amazon.