Open Standards: Ma.gnolia as an Example

In the comments to the last short post on Ma.gnolia’s OpenID 2.0 adoption Matthias Pfefferle mentioned its use of microformats and other open standards. I just had a look at it and it’s quite impressive indeed.

The screenshot at the end of this post shows my Ma.gnolia profile. Content of that profile is marked up with these microformats:

• hAtom – for syndicating content
• xFolk – for publishing collections of bookmarks
• rel=”nofollow” – added to each link of the bookmarked sites indicating that search engines should not add weight to them
• rel=”tag” – tags are indicated that way, of course
• hCard – used to indicate who saved the bookmark, also contacts are marked up with hCards
• XFN – links to my contacts are marked up with rel=”contact”
• rel=”license” – indicating the use of a Creative Commons license
• rel=”bookmark” – well, describes a bookmark
• Also the datetime-design-pattern is used to describe the date a bookmark was saved.

Other standards supported are OpenID, MicroID, OAuth, and RSS. Since a couple of weeks it also support APML.

Those standards make it easy and comfortable for users to aggregate, share, publish, import, and export content, but also personal information like contacts and profile data. If more applications marked up content like Ma.gnolia, life was easier on the web.
Hopefully I have not forgotten any microformat or other standard supported. Update: Of course, I have forgotten some; added them to the list. Thanks Matthias!