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rel-tag microformats - what it is and how they can be useful

Mar 29

The rel-tag microformat is a very basic and easy to implement microformat. It basically link together other content tagged with the same keywords. Tags are very prominent on our two local favorite sites Amatomu and Muti. Handy stuff…

When you do a blog post, you can create tags by simply entering links at the bottom of your posts. Technorati tags is very popular and lots of blogs implement those. If you look at any of my posts on this blog, you will see them. They look like this:

It does not do much apart from if you click one of those tags, they take you to the Technorati web site and shows you all the latest blog posts tagged with the same words. Cool, sure, but what has that got to do with microformats and how can that be of any use?

Lets look at submitting a blog post to Muti. So you click your Muti bookmarklet and it shoots to the Muti sumit page.

As you can see, you can enter some tags to tag your submission. This works fine accept a lot of people do not enter any tags and other come along and do it for them.

What Muti can do at a later stage is to rather parse the post that is being submitted and look for the rel-tag microformat. It can then put those tags in by default without you having to do it! Nice, eh?

Same goes for Amatomu although they already do something like this. I’m not sure though if they use the microformat rel-tag specification, but their tags is pretty nifty and relevant! Well done boys!

Making a rel-tag:

When you do a normal link you would do it like this:

<a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/microformats”>microformats</a>

To make this link a rel-tag microformat you need to add the attribute rel=”tag” like this:

<a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/microformats” rel=”tag”>microformats</a>

WOW! That was simple, eh? Just be extremely cautious. According to microformat standards, the tag name is NOT specified by the word between your HTML <a href> </a> tags! It looks at the last segment of the URL. It does NOT take kind to query strings! So you cannot do your rel-tags like this:

<a href=”http://muti.co.za/hot?tag=microformats” rel=”tag”>microformats</a>

Would NOT work! Be aware of that.

If you use Flock to blog, then it creates those tags automatically for you. Another good reason to look into Flock

Conclusion

rel-tags is a simple format. It could become very useful once social bookmarking sites adopt the standards and start utilising them to make their submission processes simpler. The problem is to get everyone to add rel-tags to their blog posts. If these guys (Amatomu and Muti) are going to implement parsers for it, it would be useless if only 5% of blogs actually tag their posts. There must be a much greater adoption for it to become really handy!