I’ve been reading a book on Microformats, written by John Allsop. I’m not very far into the book yet, but so far it sounds very interesting.

I’ve read a fair bit about Microformats in many blog posts, and the microformats website itself is very informative. While I understand and appreciate that microformats are important for the greater good of the internet infrastructure, as a business owner and manager of the development team, I’ve been struggling to find a business proposition as to why we should start using them in our website development.

I assumed they would make coding more complex and perhaps increase client budgets (through development time) for no real gain for the client. I’m still tossing around the idea in my head, of how can the client really benefit from the use of microformats on their website.So I decided to play with a few microformats and dreamed up a hCard and jQuery combination (or mashup?).

Using jQuery it was really easy to dig into the body of the page and pull out address information, which is exactly what microformats are all about, creating markup that firstly humans can read and second computers can read.

Once you have the data using jQuery, your imagination is the limit really. I came up with a few trivial examples. The first example demostrates mining for the address and simply linking it to maps.google.com.au. The second example mines for the addresses and then as you click on them, plots them on a Google Map. I was amazed at how quickly and easy it was to program these examples using jQuery.

With this expirmentation I’ve found the business proposition and argument as to why we should start programming using microformats where possible; they make development easier and faster all the while increasing the infrastructure of the web!

You can download the source for the microformat and jQuery examples.