"Microformats are open data formats that some Yahoo! sites support. You can't see them (unless you do a "view source" on a web page), but they're there -- bits of HTML that describe things like contact information (hcard), a review (hreview), an event (hcalendar), or a listing (hlisting). Microformats make data in web pages reuseable since the data is in a standard, canonical, format instead of just a jumble of HTML. Thousands of sites expose their data in Microformats, and that data is available for developers to use. One of the best opportunities for developers to make use of Microformats is in the forthcoming Firefox 3 web browser which features a new global Microformats object and API. The new API makes finding and parsing Microformats trivial and efficient..."

"...The best part is not only that the information is human-readable, but it can also be extracted and processed automatically by machines or software. The primary distinguishing trait of a microformats-enabled HTML page is that it has semantic meaning.

"Today, the World Wide Web Consortium completed an important link between Semantic Web and microformats communities. With "Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages", or GRDDL (pronounced "griddle"), software can automatically extract information from structured Web pages to make it part of the Semantic Web.

"...microformats are not an alternative for RDF, not even a “poor man’s version”. But that was not a design goal at any time. What’s more: microformats are no first class semantic web objects in any way either. Rather, they are the simplest imaginable solution for semantically correct markup, limited to the most common data formats out there..."

"...These small bits of Semantic HTML will allow website viewers to interact with websites in many more ways. For example..."

"...This article will focus more on how to extract microformats data from the HTML, how the basic parsing rules work, and how they differ from XML..."

"Microformats are little snippets of information that are semantically tagged so you know what they are..."

Microformats support is one of the most relevant features coming to Firefox 3. It is not one of those instant gratification features like spell checking or tabbed browsing. It’s in the league of offline web applications support, web content handling and live bookmarks

"Operator leverages microformats and other semantic data that are already available on many web pages to provide new ways to interact with web services."