HighTechCville

A somewhat odd title, but what I mean is that the various links to tags in HighTechCville now have an extra attribute in the url:

rel ='tag'


That extra piece of markup is an example of Microformatting, which is an attempt to add machine readable meaning to dynamic content. If you look at Matt Dawson’s you will see that he is tagged with CSS. The URL is marked up like this:

<a href="/search/tag/CSS" id="CSS" rel="tag">CSS</a>


Now, any search engine or other tool will know that CSS is a tag. The interesting wrinkle is that the value for the tag is now what is the text of the link, but the end of the url! So in the below example the tag is CSS, not I Love CSS:


<a href="/search/tag/CSS" id="CSS" rel="tag">I Love CSS</a>


To learn more about the rel-tag microformat, visit the microformat.org page. Also, to easily see what rel-tag are defined on a page, use this little JavaScript Validator

A big thanks to Michael Herndon for bringing up the use of the rel-tag!

The next step is to find a real use for rel-tag! Technorati uses tags heavily because they index lots of blog content. However, HighTechCville isn’t a blog, so we’ll see if this extra meaning gets reused!