::: {.hreview} [0.2]{.version style="DISPLAY: none"}
Reviewing the hReview microformat
Jun 23, 2006 by [Larry O'Brien]{.reviewer .fn} hReview
???☆☆ Reviews are one of the most valuable pieces of information one could hope for, guiding purchases as they do, and one of the types of information where the Web is, I would argue, noticeably inferior to print (an exception would be the work of Websites like dpreview.com that essentially apply print-style rigor but happen to disseminate their work via the Web). hReview is a microformat for reviews. Interestingly, hReview is implemented as a series of CSS "class" attributes applied to standard HTML \<span>s. For instance, if you were to look at the source of this post, you should see the "stars" above are encapsulated in an element \<ABBR class="rating" title="3" worst="0" best="5">. It appears that this CSS "class" style for encoding is common, at least if my perusal of microformats.org is any indication. Although this is in contrast with RSS, the most successful microformat to date, it seems to me a good design trade-off: instead of creating a world of side-by-side files (as we have with RSS and FOAF) you end up with, at worst, "just" a perfectly readable bit of HTML. On the other hand, spidering is harder (to discover all the hReviews on a site, you have to spider all the HTML on the site, rather than just retrieving the, say, .hreview files). On the other, other hand, perhaps spidering is something best left to others (could you not use the Alexa index?). I give the hReview format 3 stars simply because I have nothing to compare it to. I will be interested in trying to find this review via Technorati microformat search. :::