TownNews Blox will include hNews microformat standard

TownNews has partnered with the Associated Press to make it easier for both humans and machines to read the news. TownNews announced in a written statement today that it’s worked with the Associated Press to include a feature in its new Blox content management system: the hNews microformat.

Microformats are ways of coding content to make it clear to readers, both human and machine, what that content is. For example, the text that makes up a byline is coded as a byline. The text that makes up a headline is coded as a headline, and so on. That way, when machines read the content, they will be better able to parse it (display it) for human readers, and computers will be able to extract better meaning from search results because the content will have meaning built into it.

hNews is one of many microformats in use on the Web today. It is, as TownNews reports, not proprietary. It is owned neither by TownNews nor by the Associated Press. The hNews microformat is an open standard, just like many of the other core technologies the Web depends on, such as HTML, CSS and PHP.

Todd Martin, vice president for technology and director of the AP news registry, said in the release that the hNews microformat “provides a consistent and higher fidelity way of presenting news online and enables the semantic interpretation of news for humans and machines.” He added that hNews allows publishers to add tags and other metadata to their content “to improve the user experience, attract audiences and advertisers, and facilitate searching for specific types of content.”

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