FAQ > general > So you're talking about microformats for Twitter?
Actually, no. Don't confuse the role of Twitter Data as a means for embedding abstract data with the uses of Twitter Data to embed particular data.
Microformats are a suite of special-cased conventions for embedding specific types of common data in Web pages. It has limited or no applicability outside of this use case. The conventions it defines are built on top of a lower-level, well-defined formal syntax (HTML) which makes it possible to embed data in various, legal ways.
As a movement, Microformats are far more concerned with trying to standardize representations of common pieces of data than with standardizing how the embedding of that data should be done in the abstract. Thus, it is really a community standardization effort around various ontologies, not a technical standardization effort. The result of this focus is that we see a mishmash of different means for embedding data across the various Microformat specificiations. Microformats is specifically not about a means for an application to define its own "microformat"--a term that makes no sense, since something can't be a microformat without being standardized by community.
Like HTML in the Microformats case, Twitter Data is one abstraction level lower, and concerned with a formal means of making abstract data embeddable in Twitter in a natural and searchable way. What that data actually represents, for example, a microsformat, JSON string, or Base64-encoded bits, is what Twitter Data enables, but not strictly what Twitter Data is about.
The purpose of Twitter Data is to enable community-driven efforts to arrive at conventions for common pieces of data that are embeddable in Twitter by formal means. In other words, "microformats" as community-standardized conventions are completely compatible with Twitter Data and can (and in our opinion, should) be built on top of Twitter Data.
Last updated on May 26, 2009 by Todd Fast
