In case you missed it from my linklog, there’s a nice series of posts over at Alex Faaborg’s blog about microformats and the reasoning behind a new extension called Operator. The posts:

Microformats - Part 0: Introduction

An introduction to microformats and some related links. Also some information on why they are useful.

That’s what microformats are, adding semantics to markup to take it from being machine readable to being machine understandable.

Microformats - Part 1: Structured Data Chaos

Discusses one of the problems with RSS: lots of labels and buttons, and the eventual change with browsers agreeing on a set of icons. Right now other data such as events and contact information also has this problem:

This is a problem that only the browser can solve. Just like with RSS, it is time for Web browsers to provide the user with a clean, consistent, and simplistic user interface.

Microformats - Part 2: The Fundamental Types

What formats should be supported and how they are connected.

Detecting information in Web pages and handing that information off to other applications changes the role of the Web browser from being solely a HTML renderer to being an information broker.

Microformats - Part 3: Introducing Operator

Today Mozilla Labs is releasing Operator, a microformat detection extension developed by Michael Kaply at IBM. Operator demonstrates the usefulness of semantic information on the Web, in real world scenarios.