Microformat

Microformats (μF) are predefined HTML markup (like HTML classes) created to serve as descriptive and consistent metadata about elements, designating them as representing a certain type of data (such as contact information, geographic coordinates, events, products, recipes, etc.). They allow software to process the information reliably by having set classes refer to a specific type of data rather than being arbitrary.

Microformats emerged around 2005 and were predominantly designed for use by search engines, web syndication and aggregators such as RSS. Google confirmed in 2020 that it still parses microformats for use in content indexing. Microformats are referenced in several W3C social web specifications, including IndieAuth and Webmention.

Although the content of web pages has been capable of some "automated processing" since the inception of the web, such processing is difficult because the markup elements used to display information on the web do not describe what the information means. Microformats can bridge this gap by attaching semantics, and thereby obviating other, more complicated, methods of automated processing, such as natural language processing or screen scraping. The use, adoption and processing of microformats enables data items to be indexed, searched for, saved or cross-referenced, so that information can be reused or combined.

As of 2013, microformats allow the encoding and extraction of event details, contact information, social relationships and similar information.

As of 2026, microformats continue to be supported by modern web browsers and search engines as part of structured data processing on web pages. However, their usage has declined in favor of more recent standards such as JSON-LD and Schema.org, which provide greater flexibility for expressing structured information.

Despite this, microformats remain in use in legacy systems and are still recognized by parsers for extracting semantic information from HTML content. They continue to be referenced in various web specifications and contribute to machine-readable data extraction in HTML documents.

Microformats2, abbreviated as mf2, is the updated version of microformats. Mf2 provides an easier way of interpreting HTML structured syntax and vocabularies than the earlier ways that made use of RDFa and microdata.