From the web page, you can read the address for the event: 1401 N Shoreline Blvd., Mountain View, California, 94043. Operator picks out the address as an instance of the adr data format, with the corresponding (X)HTML source fragment:

            <div class="address adr">
              <span class="street-address">1401 N Shoreline Blvd.</span><br />
              <span class="locality">Mountain View</span>,
              <span class="region">California</span> <span class="postal-code">94043</span>
            </div>
         

Note the use of the <div> tag to wrap the address and class attributes to separate and name the parts of the address. This (X)HTML fragment meets two goals simultaneously: it displays an address naturally and appropriately for a human reader of the web page, and it uses (X)HTML elements and attributes to enable programs (such as Operator) to reliably parse an address from the (X)HTML. You will see this design goal of satisfying human and computer readers repeated among all the microformats.

With the adr microformat parsed out, you as a user can then apply an action to the address. Operator has by default two actions (in addition to Debug) that you can apply to an address: Find with Google Maps and Find with Yahoo! Maps. Selecting the first action, for instance, loads the following into the browser:

            http://maps.google.com/maps?q=1401%20N%20Shoreline%20Blvd.,%20California,%20MountainÂ
            %20View,%2094043
         

This action, in effect, enables Operator to perform a mashup of Upcoming.yahoo.com and Google Maps—and more generally, any web site that has adr microformat data with Google Maps. Note also how Operator enables the user to invoke this action in the context of web browsing. Firefox with Operator joins a web site with an adr microformat to Google Maps—and not a ­third-­party web application.

Operator allows you to add other actions. Later in the chapter, I will show you how to add other user scripts to Operator and to write a basic user script to geocode addresses.

The hCard data format is meant to represent a person or organization, specifically contact information for the entity. The (X)HTML source for the embedded hCard microformat is as follows:

            <div class="venue location vcard">
              <span class="fn org">
                <a href="/venue/259/">Computer History Museum</a>
              </span>
              <br />
              <div class="address adr">
                <span class="street-address">1401 N Shoreline Blvd.</span><br />
                <span class="locality">Mountain View</span>,
                <span class="region">California</span>
                <span class="postal-code">94043</span>
              </div>
              <span class="geo" style="display: none">
                <span class="latitude">37.4149</span>,
                <span class="longitude">-122.078</span>
              </span>
            </div>
         

You might be wondering why you will see vcard (instead of hcard) as a class attribute. The reason is that hCard is derived from the vCard standard. You can compare the vCard data that Operator creates for this page to the (X)HTML source to see the similarities:

            BEGIN:VCARD
            PRODID:-//kaply.com//Operator 0.8//EN
            SOURCE:http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/144855
            NAME:Mashup Camp IV at Computer History Museum (Wednesday, July 18, 2007) - Upcoming
            VERSION:3.0
            N:;;;;
            ORG;CHARSET=UTF-8:Computer History Museum
            FN;CHARSET=UTF-8:Computer History Museum
            UID:
            ADR;CHARSET=UTF-8:;;1401 N Shoreline Blvd.;Mountain View;California;94043;
            GEO:37.4149;-122.078
            END:VCARD
         

Among the default actions in Operator for hCard is Add to Yahoo! Contacts, which, when invoked for this page, loads the following URL into the browser:

            http://address.yahoo.com/?fn=Computer%20History%20Museum&co=Computer%20History%20MusÂ
            eum&ha1=1401%20N%20Shoreline%20Blvd.&hc=Mountain%20View&hs=California&hz=94043&A=C
         

The hCalendar microformat represents events and is roughly speaking the iCalendar format transformed into a microformat. (See Chapter 15 for a discussion of iCalendar.) The (X)HTML source for the hCalendar microformat is a large fragment that I will not quote here. To find it, you can use Operator or look at the source and find a <div> element that begins with this:

<div id="calendarContainer" class="vcalendar"> <!-- Begin vCalendar -->

and ends lines later with this:

</div> <!-- End vCalendar -->

The pieces of (X)HTML in between contain event data, such as this:

            <abbr class="dtstart" title="20070718T130000">Wednesday, July 18, 2007
            </abbr>
         

and the following:

<abbr class="dtend" title="20070719T140000">

As in the case of hCard, you might wonder why the hCalendar format would use class="vcalendar" and not class="hcalendar". vCalendar was the precursor to iCalendar, a fact that is reflected in the iCalendar standard (which if you look at the iCalendar for the Upcoming.yahoo.com event listed earlier), you have the following structure:

            BEGIN:VCALENDAR
            [...]
            DTSTART:20070718T130000
            DTEND:20070718T140000
            [...]
            END:VCALENDAR
         

Among the default actions associated with hCalendar are ones to send the event data to Google Calendar, Yahoo! Calendar, and 30boxes.com. Compare how you moved event data with APIs in Chapter 15 with this approach of extracting microformat data and sending that data to other services via an HTTP GET request.

The geo data format represents a geospatial location, specifically a latitude and longitude. The (X)HTML source for the geo instance is as follows:

            <span class="geo" style="display: none">
              <span class="latitude">37.4149</span>,
              <span class="longitude">-122.078</span>
            </span>
         

With Operator, you can map this location to Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps, or you can export it as KML.

Upcoming.yahoo.com supports the tagging of individual events. For instance, among the tags for the example event is mashup. You can find this tag marked up using the tag microformat in the (X)HTML source. For example:

<a href="/tag/mashup/" rel="tag" class="category">mashup</a>

You’ll see from the following discussion that the combination of rel=tag in an <a> element is indicative of a tag microformat and that the last path component of the URL (that is, mashup) is the text of the tag. By default, there are actions in Operator to look this tag up in such web sites as del.icio.us, Flickr, Upcoming.yahoo.com, and YouTube.