We now have confirmation that something that many of us in the community have suspected for some time (owing to Ray Ozzie’s Live Clipboard demo): that upcoming versions of Internet Explorer, expected some time in the next 12-18 months, will include support for microformats.
This, apparently, is straight from Chris Wilson, the new platform architect for IE:
“Mash-ups will continue to drive innovation. Componentization and semantic tagging of data will be supported,” Wilson told the Ajax Experience crowd. Wilson touted the harnessing of microformats, like Microsoft has done with its Live Clipboard effort, as “real world stuff” that will “make the Web much more usable.”
“Microformats add meaning to content in HTML,” Wilson said.
With discussions around support for microformats in Firefox 3, and Apple showing strong support for microformats as well, it’s only a very short amount of time before we can move on from the “so who’s using microformats?” question to “okay, so now what can we do with them?”
Factory Joe 
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Chris, yes thats a valid point.. I have always been asking myself Ok, Microformat exists but how do we use and leverage the technology ?? I find it so difficult to express myself, as most IT (Enterprise level) have no clue about it !!
IE8 will certainly bring it to the forefront.. !!
Chris, I’m not even sure what you mean by “IE will support microformats” – as I understand it, the point is that you can add semantics to HTML without NEEDING browser support.
At any rate, I didn’t say anything that sounded like “IE will support microformats” in my talk – I said they add semantic meaning to HTML (duh) and LiveClipboard shows how they can be made applicable in the real world TODAY – no browser upgrade required (again, no news there), and that I think they are great (hey, Bill Gates said this publicly back in March).
Somewhere along the way, this got translated into “upcoming versions of Internet Explorer, expected some time in the next 12-18 months, will include support for microformats.” I did not say that, and could not make such a statement at this point anyway.
There have been a few things like this going around – like MJ Foley’s article – that are not correct. Watch my blog for a post shortly about them.
-Chris Wilson
Yeah, the Microsoft one.