Could you give me an example of what the Microformat is made for.
And what are the benefits of the geo segment when added to a website?
By advance, thanks!

I'll have to admit that I had to look them up. ;)

About microformats [microformats.org]

They look like a new set of standards for certain data sets. I guess that if there were more tools out there that took advantage of this sort of format we would see more people talking about it. I got the impression it had a lot to do with personal data like vCards, calendars, resumes, etc.

apparently they are going to be the next big thing. but quite when that will be... who knows. they seem pretty useful though.
it's really easy too. all it takes is you adding a few extra class names to your code.
so whereas before you might have marked something up like this:

<div>
<p>Tony Blair's House</p>
<p>10 Downing Street</p>
<p>London</p>
<p>United Kingdom</p>
</div>

you just add in a few standardised class names:

<div class="adr">
<p class="fn">Tony Blair</p>
<p class="street-address">10 Downing Street</p>
<p class="region">London</p>
<p class="country-name">United Kingdom</p>
</div>

and then software can visit the page and lift the 'hcard' into your address book, or whatever.
it already works on windows mail - if you've got a firefox extension. you can add in longitude and latitude numbers as well, and then people can go straight to its location on google maps, or whatever program they use.

the best one i have seen is hreviews. you can mark up all your reviews in a similar way, and in the future (...so they say) anyone searching for reviews of a particular product will be given just the reviews themselves, from wherever they are, rather than a list of pages with the reviews on.

you can already ping technorati with this stuff as well, which apparently makes some special use of it, although i haven't seen much benefit yet. so presumably the other search engines will follow suit one day.

i'm not very good at explaining. check out microformats.org anyway. there's some interesting stuff on there.

...just wondering whether it's worth introducing it all now.

Thanks londrum, too bad only FF uses long and lat.

If this sort of thing were built into browsers we might see this take off.

This reminds me that IE used to have support for some special vCard attributes for form fields. If you added something like

vcard_name="vCard.DisplayName"

in the form's

<input>

tag then the browser would attempt to auto fill the information. Those attributes don't validate though. This microformats scheme will validate. The problem now is support.