Firefox User Interface Designer, Alex Faaborg, recently posted up a series of posts about a new feature slated for Firefox 3 - microformats [via
Read/WriteWeb].
What are they? Basically, they're a set of standard formats designed to help software like web browsers understand bits of information better. So in the future, Firefox will know that a certain bit of information is an address without the need for guesswork, and can provide a button for you to click to show you how to get there on your favourite mapping site.
This idea has been used for a while for calendars (the iCal format) and
business cards (vCard format) but this is the first time its been
implemented into a web browser.
Anyway, Alex explains the concepts very well in his series, and they're well worth the read (complete with nice pictures too
), so check out the first part
here.