Following the WSG Microformats event | Comments (4)
Posted in Events on 21st October 2006, 7:13 pm by Stuart
Thursday night’s Microformats event went really well and judging by the feedback I’ve got so far everyone enjoyed the presentations.
A big difference from last time was that the event was free and I felt this contributed to a relaxed atmosphere as we had done away with the need for people to register. The attendance was pretty healthy at about 100 people and I saw plenty of new faces amongst the more well known characters. The new venue was brilliant and unless anything changes this will be the home of future WSG events in London.
The Presentations
Norm kicked off with a nice overview of the differences between the W3C’s Semantic Web (Uppercase S uppercase W) and microformats. He then went on to show some typical examples of how microformats can be implemented.
Jeremy’s presentation followed on well from Norm’s by going deeper into the details of how html elements and attributes are used to provide further meaning to data that already exists in a document. Towards the end of his presentation he touched on methods that exist for parsing micorformats which neatly set-up Drew’s presentation.
In his presentation was “Can your website be your API”, Drew talked about how existing sites use API’s to provide access to data when in fact with microformats and an appropriate parser the page can provide all of that information itself. This approach could result in it being possible to implement microformats on your website so you can use them without needing to create a separate API.
After Drew’s presentation the Q&A session provoked some interesting questions and answers and it seemed to be the right way to give the audience a chance to get more out of the evening rather than just to come and listen to what someone is saying. I would expect that in future events where the event is focussed on a specific subject it would make sense to do the same thing.
The Podcasts
I’ve spent some time today putting together the podcasts and they are available via the Podcast feed. To subscribe simply copy the url (http://muffinresearch.co.uk/wsg/audio/index.xml) into the podcasting application of your choice.
Thanks
A big thank-you to Norm, Jeremy and Drew for taking the time to put together such a high standard of presentations. I am also extremely grateful to Dean Wilson who made the venue possible and as always, thanks to everyone who turned out for the event.
So what’s next
I hope to be annoucing the date for the December event within the next week if possible. Watch this space. The topic for December is going to be Internationalisation.
Related links
- Slides: Mark Norman, Francis Microformats
- Slides: Jeremy Keith, Implementing Microformats
- Slides: Drew McLellan, Can you website be your API?
- Podcast RSS Feed
- Blog Post: WSG Microformats Talk, London 2006
- Blog Post: The WSG Meeting on Microformats in London
- Blog Post: WSG London #2 - Microformats
Thanks a lot for organizing the event. I must agree that the venue was spot-on: Right size, location and in the vincinity of the pubstandards local.
Hey, if you had allowed SPANS here this could be an hreview
Another great event, Stupot. Thanks for organising it.
Cheers Stuart. And ditto to Chris’s comment. Great venue. A big thanks to all threee speakers. It was an enjoyable night. Will get around to blogging about it at some point this week
Thanks for organising. Learnt a lot about microformats. Enjoyed it. Good location, a bit easier to get to than last time.