Google Maps Now With Microformats

Google announces that now they have embedded Microformats in Google Maps. Microformats allow tools to make more sense of your web pages, while not changing the visual appearance for visitors to your site one whit.

About Microformats:
"Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging)."

Gregor J. Rothfuss of Google's Maps Team and Kevin Marks, Apps Team writes,"Today we're happy to announce that we are adding support for the hCard microformat to Google Maps results. Why should you care about some invisible changes to our HTML? By marking up our results with the hCard microformat, your browser can easily recognize the address and contact information in the page, and help you transfer it to an addressbook or phone more easily. Firefox users can install the Operator or Tails extension; IE or Safari users can use one of these bookmarklets.

Using Microformats in your Maps API application

You can get the benefits of microformats for your own maps applications if you change your HTML to contain the necessary hcard classes. In this simple example, we've changed the infowindow to contain an hCard formatted address. The code for that is below:

For more on Microformats visit Microformats.org.

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