Microformats have been getting a fair amount of attention these days. Between the new value class pattern, Google's Rich Snippets and the Associated Press's move to create hNews (though, technically not a microformat), not a day goes by that I don't see a blog post or article about microformats.
A new kind of web—a semantic web—would be made up of information marked up in such a way that software can also easily understand it. Before considering how we might achieve such a web, let’s look at what we might be able to do with it.