Add Microformats markup

[barryf]

This PR adds Microformats markup to Minima's templates to make post content machine-readable and discoverable.

Microformats makes HTML content as easy to consume as JSON APIs without needing a separate feed. Parser libraries are available for Ruby, Python, PHP, Node and Go and more.

W3C recommended protocols, including Webmention and Micropub depend on Microformats and so it would be a great help for the default Jekyll theme's templates to support them.

• Example Jekyll post with Microformats markup
• JSON output from Microformats parser

I've tried to make the changes as lightweight as possible, but I'm open to any suggestions or improvements.

[tantek]

I have reviewed the diffs for the source and the Example Jekyll post with Microformats markup output and they look good to me.

[pathawks]

@barryf Thanks for the PR!

Minima already relies on jekyll-seo-tag for providing microdata, which is consumed by Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. It seems that with HTML5, microdata is being favored over the old Microformats.

Including Microformats in addition to Microdata would result in a lot of duplicated information. What are the concrete benefits of including both?

[DirtyF]

@barryf microformats website says it supersedes microdata but I see that a spec was recently published on https://www.w3.org/TR/microdata/

So what are the concrete applications of adding microformats if microdata is still a thing for the w3c? 🤔

/cc @aarongustafson (developer the webmention plugin for Jekyll) who might enlighten us on that very matter 💡

[barryf]

Thanks for reviewing, @pathawks and @DirtyF. I can’t comment on Microdata and its positioning in W3C (perhaps @tantek can?) but from my experience the strength of Microformats is the many implementations being used that are built on them.

Brid.gy pulls comments, likes, and reshares on social networks back to your website by marking them up in Microformats (e.g. 1 and 2 from Twitter) for your site to parse. @aarongustafson’s Webmention plugin uses the webmention.io service to parse these responses to your posts in Microformats and makes them available to your Jekyll site to include as comments.

Microformats are now supported by default in Mastodon - the largest decentralised microblogging network - and Micro.blog - a new social network for independent microblogs. All sites using Known, a social learning platform, have Microformats and there are hundreds of sites built by members of the IndieWeb community.

[aarongustafson]

There is very little downside to supporting both microformats and microdata and a lot of upside to supporting both. Microdata can be useful in sharing contexts (alongside OpenGraph data as well) and in search. Microformats are also considered in search contexts as well as in the tools @barryf mentioned and in services like Mercury (née Readability). Additionally, they provide a nice clean set of class names for styling (and you’re probably are already using a set of class-es for the info the various microformats are identifying, so i’t no like we’re adding a lot of cruft here).

[DirtyF]

Let's go with Microformats then 😄

[aterenin]

I'd encourage folks to be careful with precisely where the markup is added, to ensure it is accurate even for sites that are not blogs.

For example, the microformats page says that:

rel="me" is used on hyperlinks from one page about a person to other pages about that same person.

Should we use rel="me" in the case that the site is about a project and not a person?

Similarly, this page says that:

rel="author" is for relating an article or post to a page or site representing its author, typically to give them credit for their work (or portions of it, like books, articles, blog posts etc).

Does it make sense to add rel="author" to the title link, if the page used is for a GitHub project? In that case shouldn't rel="author" be used if the page links to the authors' homepage, not to itself?

I'm not familiar enough with microformats to answer these questions, I would encourage folks to consider them.