Microformats in IBM Portal 6.1

I’m at the IBM Portal technical conference this week and thought I’d mention (something funny about) a new feature in IBM Portal.

IBM has been big on “web 2.0″ lately; I’ve heard them mention more about semantics and microformats in the past week than in the past year.

They’re so big on it, that they confused themselves…

The Portal team has introduced the idea of a ’static HTML’ page. The static page allows HTML or website developers to create the markup for a page and then upload that static HTML to be used as the template for a new Portal page.

All you have to do is add a “microformat” to the static page to tell it where to place the portlet(s).

Sounds a lot like the original Microformats (microformats.org), doesn’t it? The original notion of Microformats is a standardized set of CSS class names to apply to markup, to represent standard things like people (hcard) or events (vevent). I heard IBM talk about these at a Lotusphere Comes to You event earlier this year.

I actually presented on Microformats last year at CapTech. In fact, there’s also a developerWorks article on the real microformats from 2006: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-microformats/index.html

Sounds like they liked the term so much, they reused it for this new Portal feature… nice.

Anyway, to read more about IBM’s microformat feature, check out the InfoCenter on Static Pages.