Forum:Microformats on Genealogy

To use Microformats on Genealogy, install firefox and then install Operator. The new toolbar you will see has an options menu. Select General tab/display styles/Actions. Then go to Template:Showinfo geo. You should be able to pull up a googlemaps for Green County. Operator is simply configurable- .Js scripts can add new actions that take the microdata and format an http address to fire. A list of them is available at the Operator author's blog site.

Microformats have been incorporated into info pages from the start, and their use will expand:
 * User can pull up maps on multiple locations indicated in an article. This works now using Template:Showinfo geo.  This is an improvement over the wikipedia template coord because coordinates can be queried dynamically by templates.  EG when a birth location has a corresponding article, a template's logic fires the showinfo geo template to fetch the coordinates from the info page associated with the placename article (eg:Greene County, Ohio/info).  Extraction of lat/long geo coordinates is possible by scanning WP for coord template use, auto uptransfering the article to Genealogy, then creating the corresponding info page.
 * Displaying exporting events onto a timeline using MIT's Exhibit. Status- I can create these on a local page generated from data on other sites, but not from genealogy site.  The main problem seems to be the requirement that the abbr html tag be used, and wikimedia engine masks it off.  This also requires use of Operator and Firefox.  I have no idea if/when IE will use it.
 * By option, users can include contact info on their User pages so that friends may download into their contacts applications like Outlook.

Status: Microformats were formerly incorporated directly onto the Info page display table. This was an interim step, since these tables are intended only for adding or deleting data elements- not for presenting the information to end users. The microformat codes will be moved into the main article via the Template:Showinfo person

Microformats we will support:
 * Hcard (for user contact info, and possibly ancestors, though the Hcard was intended for living persons)
 * Hcalendar
 * (to transfer birthdays of relatives to a calendar)
 * To enable dynamic timeline displays like Exhibit mentioned above
 * Geo (for maps like GoogleMaps for single or multiple locations cited in an article.

TBD:If anyone wants to help out- investigation is needed to figure out if Operator or anything like it works on IE. Also, we need to figure out how to get around the tag limitation on encoding DStart's for vevents. I expect it may be non trivial since the advocates of microformats have installed working examples for hCard and Geo, but not for hCalendar articles. However, possibly we could hack around it with CSS. (but maybe media wiki will still diable them?)
 * ~  Ph l o x  18:46, 25 November 2007 (UTC)