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Microformats

Microformats

 are a practical example of the way the semantic web will develop. Data can 

be exchanged through standard microformats such as hCalendar and hReview which are 

used to incorporate data from other sites into the Google listings (see www.microformats.org 

for details). You can see examples of microformats which Google has incorporated as star 

ratings from sites it has indexed if you perform a search on movies, hotels or popular 

products.

Microformats

A simple set of formats 

based on XHTML 

for describing and 

exchanging information 

about objects, including 

product and travel 

reviews, recipes and 

event information.

(In Chapter 4 we will look briefly at how governments promote and control, through laws, 

the use of the Internet in their jurisdiction.) In this section, we look at the growth of the 

Internet as a global phenomenon and how the standards described in the previous section 

were devised. The Internet is quite different from all previous communication media since it 

is much less easy for governments to control and shape its development. Think of print, TV, 

phone and radio and you can see that governments can exercise a fair degree of control on 

what they find acceptable.

Esther Dyson (1998) has been influential in advising on the impact of the Internet on 

society; she describes