The other week John Allsopp's Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 dropped onto my doormat after a pre-order of several months. Paul Haine's HTML Mastery has a good introductory chapter about microformats, and Brian Suda's Using Microformats e-book is another worthy starting point. But neither are able to devote the time or leaf-space to providing a solid background to the microformats story and an in-depth look at the most common schemas.

Thankfully Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 does just that.

The first two chapters (a mere 24 pages of the 340 total) takes the reader on a whistle-stop tour of the concept of microformats, their benefits, and general structure. The third chapter (Structural and Semantic HTML) encourages the reader to use appropriate HTML elements to add “natural” semantics inherent to (X)HTML and justifies the use of DIV and SPAN elements.

The following seven chapters cover the major microformats in increasing complexity:

* rel-licence, rel-tag, rel-nofollow and VoteLinks)

* XFN

* locations (geo and adr)

* hCard

* hCalendar

* hReview and hResume

* hAtom

The last third of the book contains two case studies of microformats in the wild: Cork’d as a small start-up site and Yahoo! as a large corporation. If you ever needed to convince your manager or client why you should invest time investigating microformats, paraphrase these two case studies. They demonstrate just how easy they are to implement.

Thankfully the book doesn’t try to cover too much. There must have been a temptation to cover microformats still in the draft stages, and I imagine the chapter on structural and semantic HTML could easily double or triple in length because there’s so much to cover. Instead the explanations of more complex issues are left to HTML Mastery and the HTML semantics series on John’s Microformatique blog.

If you’re already using semantic markup and intermediate CSS in your projects then there are chunks of the book that you can skip. For each microformat John covers some CSS styling techniques which, although useful to beginners will be nothing new to more experienced developers. I also found a felt that some of the examples could have made better use of “natural” XHTML semantics to prevent them being a sea of nested DIV and SPAN elements. Perhaps the examples may be subject to criticism for resembling cases of “divitis” as defined in previous chapters.

Nevertheless, on the whole the book is an excellent resource. If you want to jump in and get using microformats but don’t fancy sifting through blog discussion and the often obscure definitions on the official microformats wiki, or if you’re after clarification of the design patterns and development processes involved in creating microformat schemas, then this book is for you.