"I think Operator is giving people a new way to interact with data on the Web," Kaply told InternetNews.com. "It's a variation on what some people call 'instant mashups.' The idea is that rather than having to rely on other people to integrate data on multiple Web sites via traditional mashups, tools like Operator can provide the end-user a way to instantly pass data between multiple Web sites."

"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.

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

"...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..."

"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..."

"I’m making available a beta of Operator 0.9, which has support for Firefox 3 and uses the built-in Firefox 3 microformats support..."

"...In all this Semantic Web news, though, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The benefit of the Semantic Web is that data may be re-used in ways unexpected by the original publisher. That is the value added.

"If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this video demonstration of Operator is worth just shy of 1.5 million..."

"...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.