About Blogtools

Blogtools are my experiments with microformats and ideas around the writable web and semi-structured data. Web sites are more useful when mark-up is used to indicate data structure in addition to formatting. This semi-structured approach to building Web site allows programs to use the data on the Web sites.

The tools on this page produce, and in some cases read, HTML mark-up that can be placed on nearly any Web page. They do not write to pages directly since that would require interfacing to a wide variety of programs that people use to create Web pages, but that's certainly a possibility. Ideally, modules that produce semi-structured content would be built-in to these programs.

The programs in this collection that read microformatted data from Web pages use the page itself as their storage medium instead of a database on my Web site. This approach makes these tools lightweight and RESTful. I call this concept "page-level persistence."

To date the following tools have been created:

• hCard Editor - The hCard editor can be used to create an hCard or to modify an existing hCard. Editing existing hCards required nothing more than the URL of the page where the hCard is stored. The editor will search the page for any hCards. If there are more than one, a list of hCards will be presented. Picking one brings the data from that hCard up in the editor. Saving modified cards required cutting and pasting the new hCard text onto the page.
  
  The current version (0.9) does not support the full hCard specification and has limited formatting capabilities.

Last Modified: Tuesday, 22-Nov-2005 18:32:49 MST