GETTING USER FEEDBACK
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8
Using microformats to enhance contact
information
As shown in the previous section, user feedback may come in the form of a telephone call
or letter, rather than an e-mail, and therefore you should always add other forms of contact
details to a website??”even if the site is an online store, customers will need other ways
to get in touch (faceless multinational organizations, take note). In the most basic sense,
these can be marked up by using some headings and paragraphs, as follows:
Contact details
Mail
Company name
00, Street Name
Town or City
County or Region
Postal/ZIP code
Country name
Telephone/fax
Tel: +1 (0)0000 555555
Fax: +1 (0)0000 555556
Mobile/cell: +1 (0)7000 555555
Now, there??™s nothing at all wrong with the previous block of code: it??™s valid, it does the job
perfectly well, and it??™s semantically sound, which also means it??™s easy enough to style using
CSS. However, by utilizing microformats, the page??™s functionality can be enhanced without
compromising the markup.
More about microformats can be found at the microformats website at www.
microformats.org, and in the book Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0,
by John Allsopp, so I won??™t dwell on them too much. In short, though, microformats provide
a way of adding commonly used semantics to web pages, working with common technologies,
such as XHTML.
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