As Chris pointed out in the comments for my last post, I totally misrepresented what microformats really are.

It turns out that, rather than an XML format, a microformat is a way of displaying information in HTML, marked up with CSS classes etc in such a way that they're able to be formatted for display and made machine-accessible.

So if we were to properly construct a comic microformat, it might look something like this:

<div class="comic"> <span class="title">Silver Surfer</span> <span class="volume">3</span> <span class="issue">1</span> <span class="released">1987</span> <span class="name">Free!</span> <div class="cast"> </div> <div class="crew"> </div> </div>

With this format, you can use CSS to decide how you want to display a comic, and a machine can detect the necessary markup if it needs to access it programmatically.

I'll keep thinking about the idea of microformats. In the meantime, however, Dave from ComicVine has offered to develop a programmatic interface to his database, which really is what I've wanted all along. This could be the start of something big for Comicster (which as of right now only has a very meagre online database).

Stay tuned!