Microformats: Simple application of Friedman's Third and Fourth Flatteners in Modern Application Development

Matthew Smith

This paper will focus on how the third and fourth flatteners in Thomas L. Friedman's book The World is Flat are being applied in modern application development. It will look at a technology known as microformats which are simple standards built on top of HTML to better describe data. The paper will describe how these simple standards are changing the way we communicate. It will show how microformats relate as a practical application of Friedman's third flattener and provide real world examples of how they are being used to build the social communities that Friedman describes in his fourth flattener.

Friedman's third flattener describes advancements in workflow technology that have facilitated the flattening of world through technology. Specifically, Friedman describes how Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) have allowed millions of people to create and share content online. As a followup, Friedman describes "standards on top of standards" such as Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). He explains that these standards are to computers as HTML and HTTP are to people. They are structured markup that allows computer-to-computer communication.

In practice Friedman is correct. HTML and HTTP have gained wide adoptance as a communication protocol for human-to-human interaction. And, XML and SOAP have been widely used to better facilitate computer-to-computer communication. Recently, however, there has been a push in application development to simplify processes. Developers have a renewed focus on getting back-to-basics. In the Java world, there has been increased attention toward using POJO (Plain Old JavaScript Objects). In the web development world, front-end developers have focused on using REST (Representational State Transfer) to architect applications. REST emphasizes the use of simple HTTP operations and well-defined resources to build applications. Part of this movement has been to simplify applications by using simple HTTP that delivers HTML to handle computer-to-computer interaction. It is from this movement that microformats arose.

According to Wikipedia, microformats are "markup that allows expression of semantics in an HTML web page". Simply put, microformats are a consistent way of designing HTML that allows a computer to read the data contained in a website. In microformats, specific arrangements of HTML elements combined with meaningful id and class parameters provide the semantics for the data in the page. Essentially, microformats are a simplification of the HTML for people and XML for machines model, because HTML is used for both people and machines.

Microformats have several significant benefits over the traditional XML/SOAP approach. The first benefit is that because standard HTML is used to contain data, all pages that contain microformats can be displayed in a traditional browser. This allows data to serve a dual purpose by facilitating both computer-to-computer data exchange, as well as, computer-to-user data exchange. The second major benefit is in the transport of data. SOAP is a somewhat new protocol, and as such, has gone through some growing pains towards becoming an accepted standard. Microformats, on the other hand, are transported using the HTTP protocol that is used to transport HTML. HTTP is an old and very simple protocol that has gained universal acceptance. Every major programming language has wrapper functionality to read and write HTTP. As a result, developing applications that consume microformats is relatively straight forward. The final benefit of using microformats is in their simplicity. Anyone who can write standard HTML can write a microformat.

Microformats have been created to describe data related to content, calendars, events, lists, reviews, and more. They are slowly becoming the backbone of the semantic web.

To relate to Friedman's third flattener, we will look at a microformat that is used primarily to describe data - hCard. The hCard microformat uses structured HTML to represent people and how they organize into companies, organizations, and places. It provides standard properties for the person's name, address, telephone number, country, and more. It is becoming a standard way for web sites to display profile related data. For example, the University of Bath (http://www.bath.ac.uk/) uses the hCard microformat to display students and faculty in their "people search" function. In the future, organizations that interact with the University could use the same results to pull in information about the members of the school.

Friedman's fourth flattener describes the process of uploading. He defines uploading as the process by which users create content and upload it to the web to be viewed by others. For Friedman, uploading is the "genesis of the flat-world platform" that "not only enabled more people to author more content. It also enabled them to upload files and globalize that content - individually or as part of self forming communities". Friedman talked about the impact of blogging on journalism and the importance of communities in developing the open source movement.

Microformats have had a major role to play in the rise of social communities described in Friedman's fourth flattener. One of the most well known microformats is a tag. A tag is a type of metadata that is used to associate descriptive keywords with content. To create a tag, an HTML author simply needs to add the rel="tag" name-value pair to a link on their page. This tag tells computers and humans that read this page that the content should be associated with the tag addressed by the URL (Unified Resource Locator). When multiply sites link to the same tag, a taxonomy is created surrounding the tag's information set. Social search engines, such as Technorati (http://www.technorati.com), have been created to organize data based on these taxonomies. Social bookmarking communites, such as Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us), have also been built so that tags can grow organically by users who read content.

Another example of how microformats have contributed to Friedman's fourth flattener is via the hReview microformat. The hReview microformat is a way for HTML authors to better describe content that they publish so that it is computer readable. One of the most recent uses for hReview comes from Cork'd (http://www.corkd.com). Cork'd is a social community built up around wine enthusiasts. These enthusiasts can recommend wine, publish reviews on wine, and build contacts based on wine taste. Cork'd is a good example of Friedman's fourth flattener. It is a social community that creates content. The unique thing about Cork'd is that it publishes content using the hReview microformat. When a user writes a review for a bottle of wine, the content is automatically formatted in the hReview microformat. This allows all data in the site to be machine-readable without the use of an external XML utility.

In terms of operations management, Friedman's flatteners relate to productivity. The formation of Microformats is an extension of this. Microformats make developers more productive by reducing the number of formats. They also increase productivity by making the medium simpler.

To conclude, Thomas J. Friedman's book The World is Flat describes a world flattened through the use of technological innovations so that any business can compete on a global level. Two of his flatteners that made this possible were the protocols that enabled work flow software and the usage of this software through uploading. Movements within the software industry that stressed simplicity have led to the simplification of these protocols. Rather than using separate protocols, HTML and HTTP for humans and XML and SOAP for machines, microformats in HTML have been created to allow for the creation of data that is both human readable and machine readable. These microformats have revolutionalized how data is described in terms of Friedman's third flattener and have facilitated the creation and evolution of social communties described in his fourth flattener. As these standards become better known and understood, they will facilitate a new generation of social software that will even further flatten the world.

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