Continuing my Google Groupie status, it’s interesting to see that Google is following Yahoo’s lead in adopting microformats. I’ve thought for a while that microformats would be really useful but without a good way of using them then adoption would be very low. It’s a chicken and egg situation where browsers won’t be motivated to support them without a critical mass of content providers using them. Now an increasing number of sites support them and Firefox 3 looks set to support them too. Now all we need it better tools to create them for our own sites – I suspect it’s not something that can be done easily in Contribute!
…also, the accessibility concerns of certain microformat patterns really should be addressed, but a lot of high-level uf supporters seem to have just stuck their head in the sand on that issue in a “do not want!” kind of move…
http://www.webstandards.org/2007/04/27/haccessibility/
but it probably is something that large content producers can do easily for generated content such as student/staff directories, events calendars and so on.