I've been thinking a lot about microformats lately. I tried thinking about them sometime ago, but I just didn't get it. It seemed like a solution looking for a problem, so I decided to give it no more attention. But after a recent exchange with Tantek Celik in association with Yahoo's recently released plug-in free music player, I got to thinking that microformats or something very similar ARE GOING TO BE the new widget. This is REALLY COOL.

I know Flash widgets are all the rage now. Most of the apps on FaceBook are Flash based media SILOs. Everything on MySpace most certainly is. On these sites and on many blogs, media is trapped within a proprietary SWF wrapper, even if it is dynamically loaded it is effectively only viewable within the Flash application.

Wouldn't it be better to simply publish the media or provide links along with some interaction rules as a microformat, then let the site hosting the microformat render the experience? Anyone could write players (Just like Yahoo). That's competition on the consumer experience.

Rather than copying and embedding Flash Objects, a user can just grab the HTML microformat and paste that. Then a Flash object, or the browser, or a desktop client like iTunes can have equal access to it and play the media or parts of the media depending on the player and device.

Now I may be implying a bigger role for Microformats than are indicated by hReview, hAudio, hCard, etc., but I think as this video shows here wrapping RSS with hAudio gives a playlist microformat? iTunes plays it now, but so can anything else that wished to adopt that standard.

This reminds me of a post I made back in 2002.