Tech writing 2.0 - microformats

What will microformats mean for your technical documentation?

We live in a world where unstructured content is easy to create, but very hard to search on. Unfortunately, creating structured content, which is easy to search on, is expensive.

The latest solution to this problem is microformats. These provide simple data "chunks", embedded in a Web Page, that are both easy to use and easy to search.

The microformats principles are:

Solve a specific problem
Start as simple as possible
Design for humans first, machines second
Reuse building blocks from widely adopted standards
Modularity / embeddability
Enable and encourage decentralized development, content, services

So people involved technical writing may need to be aware of microformats such as rel-license, rel-tag and XOXO in the near future.