microformatique - a blog about microformats and “data at the edges”

In true meme style, the concept of POSH , or “plain old semantic HTML” has been sweeping many developer sites and blogs, particularly those focussed on microformats and semantic markup.

The term itself in the sense it is currently being used was coined only 3 weeks ago or so, (though uses of the expression, but not the acronym, date back to 1998, being a close analogue to POTS, or “plain old telephone service”), and was the subject of a good deal of discussion in and around the Web 2.0 Expo, in particular the Web 2.Open conference, and microformats dinner.

In a nutshell, it is a brand name for best practice development using HTML - creating valid markup, using semantic and structural markup, eschewing presentational markup, in short all the things “standards based developers” have been striving to do, and promote for several years now.

So, in you efforts to promote these principles and practices, you now have an umbrella term you can use, and an array of resources, brought together at the microformats wiki to help spread the ideas, and educate your fellow developers on “how to be POSH”.

I’ll write more soon on how this fits with microformats, and why the microformats community in particular is pushing these ideas.

[tags]POSH, semantic HTML, microformats[/tags]