“Microformats”, by John Allsopp – Book review

Microformats are a great idea with a not so great implementation (IMHO).

The recent book Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 tries to explain what microformats are and how to use them. But John Allsopp keeps getting lost in all sort of marginal details without never going to the point. I read so many pages just waiting to encounter some high-level content, like the implications of a large adoption of microformats, adoption and implementation strategies, support to microformats by the major Internet players. This type of content is not in the book.

In my opinion the book is missing:

1. a chapter with a clear syntax for the most common microformats,
2. a perspective view of the evolution of Microformats and their relevance for the web and the final users.

John Allsopp waste pages and pages explaining all sort of irrelevant details such as how to make a frame with rounded corners using CSS, showing us a very obsolete technique, and many more similar off-topic. The impression is of an author working with the main concern of generating enough pages in order not to invalidate the contract with the publisher.