AOL Adopts the hNews Microformat

We recently launched a project to come up with a unified format for marking up article content -- a standard article HTML template if you will -- the goal being to help streamline development time and increase the interoperability of products across the AOL networks. Having standardized markup structure and ID / class names allows us to stop reinventing the wheel every time a new site wants to publish an article.

Microformats were the clear choice when determining class names. By adding the class names as outlined in a microformat, we then gain the added benefit of additional semantic value within our content. We first looked at hAtom to fill the need but were quick to realize that it didn’t fully address the needs of news content as apposed to simple blog posts.

Noticing there was a need for a more complete microformat to describe news related content, we (AOL) recently assisted the AP and Media Standards Trust with ensuring hNews reached draft status within the microformats community.

Several AOL sites started delivering content on Oct. 20 2009 that support the hNews format:

• http://news.aol.com
• http://gnn.com
• http://smallbusiness.aol.com/startup/

Garnering support from Google and Yahoo search, AOL sees microformats as increasingly important to its business. By properly utilizing hNews we can now clearly define which blocks of content are specific to the article content as apposed to the cross promotional content or ads also found on the page which can dilute the relevance of a particular page as seen by search engines.

As an early adopter of hNews, we hope to help promote the wider use of the new standard.

Check out the hNews draft here: http://microformats.org/wiki/hnews