response 5 of 10:

Mar 24 22:52 UTC 2007

Re resp:3:  Um, yes, I typed it all in myself.  Did you think I had a 
secretary?  :)

Re resp:4:  Tool development typically lags behind format definition.  
Logically, it kind of has to wait until the format is fairly well 
specified.  Who wants to write software to process a moving target?  

For microformats, some simple tools were developed in parallel with the 
specs; you can find pointers to them at the microformats website, 
http://microformats.org.  As microformats become more popular - as I 
expect they will - more tools will come along.

More and more, the big websites are microformatting their data.  If you 
go to, say, http://local.yahoo.com and go to the list of recommended 
restaurants, each restaurant listing is marked up in "hCard" 
microformat.  This makes it easy for hCard-aware clients to extract 
information from the listing and do intelligent things with it.  For 
example, the Operator Firefox extension will offer to add it to your 
address book or locate it for you in either Yahoo or Google maps. You're 
not locked in to whatever the host website decides to support.

This kind of thing is an advantage to both authors and consumers of web 
content.  If a website that lists businesses adds hCard markup to the 
listings, then things like adding to address books and displaying maps 
and driving directions can be done on the client side, using a 
microformat-aware web client.  Rumor has it that Firefox 3, due out in a 
few months, will support microformats natively.  I suspect that IE will 
too, eventually.  Once native browser support becomes standard, this 
will encourage more sites to add microformat markup to their data (which 
is pretty simple to do).

response 7 of 10:

Sep 30 19:59 UTC 2008

This Microformats buisness points out the benefits inherent in 
standards based design. In other words...

Present your content in tagged heirarchal format and the end user can 
better choose the best means to parse the information (to suit their 
own situation.) 

See also, XML ;-)

response 9 of 10:

Oct 23 21:43 UTC 2008

The sentiment behind microformats is great.  After reading
microformats-related mailing lists for a while, I've got some
reservations about the execution, which strikes me as
overly-politicized.  Ad hoc centralized body to give a microformat some
official "stamp of approval", but unfortunately an ill-defined proces
for reaching such approval.  People go around and around for month after
month after month...

An alternative approach that appears to be gaining traction is RDFa, a
standard for embedding RDF semantic information in XHTML.  It's recently
become an official W3C recommendation.