Last Thursday night you would have found me giving one third of a talk on microformats to the Web Standards Group in London.

I was up first, giving a quick walk through the history of microformats, and comparing the semantic web (lowercase s, lowercase w) that these create to the Semantic Web (uppercase S, uppercase W) initiative from the W3C. I illustrated the flaws in the most common argument against microformats (XML namespaces) and highlighted the rapid adoption of microformats in the real world in the year-and-a-bit since the launch.

Then Jeremy Keith delved into the semantics used in marking up microformats, and on developing a nose for content that can be marked up and shared.

And lastly Drew McLellan in a presentation dramatically entitled "Can your website be your API?" talked about how a site using microformats could be used to implement an API for some forms of information about an individual.

After the talks, there was time for a bit of Q&A, and then we retired to the usual gaff of Pub Standards for beer and more conversation.

Hear and see

• Mark Norman Francis: Introduction and History of Microformats
• Jeremy Keith: Implementing Microformats
• Drew McLellan: Can Your Website Be Your API?
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