Microformats

A web page is constructed from discrete elements or modules. Current thinking appears to be to work directly with XHTML and add semantics as tag attributes to allow formatting to be separately specified in a Cascading Stylesheet (CSS). Further - rather than have authors create arbitrary class name attributes to link with a CSS the concept of Microformats is being shaped which allows the author to add semantic value to markup in a lightweight manner by predefining sets of class attributes according to common concepts.

If markup conforms to a predefined microformat then tools can interpret the content in a structured way.