The use, adoption and processing of microformats enables data items to be indexed, searched for, saved or cross-referenced, so that information can be reused or combined.

[7] Microformats emerged around 2005[note 2] as part of a grassroots movement to make recognizable data items (such as events, contact details or geographical locations) capable of automated processing by software, as well as directly readable by end-users.

The microformats community functions through an open wiki, a mailing list, and an Internet relay chat (IRC) channel.

[8] Most of the existing microformats originated at the Microformats.org wiki and the associated mailing list[citation needed] by a process of gathering examples of web-publishing behaviour, then codifying it.

Microformats take advantage of these standards by indicating the presence of metadata using the following attributes: For example, in the text "The birds roosted at 52.48, -1.89" is a pair of numbers which may be understood, from their context, to be a set of geographic coordinates.

However, only hCard and hCalendar have been ratified, the others remaining as drafts: Using microformats within HTML code provides additional formatting and semantic data that applications can use.

The use of microformats can also facilitate "mash ups" such as exporting all of the geographical locations on a web page into (for example) Google Maps to visualize them spatially.

Several browser extensions, such as Operator for Firefox and Oomph for Internet Explorer, provide the ability to detect microformats within an HTML document.

When hCard or hCalendar are involved, such browser extensions allow microformats to be exported into formats compatible with contact management and calendar utilities, such as Microsoft Outlook.

[25][26] Opera Software CTO and CSS creator Håkon Wium Lie said in 2005 "We will also see a bunch of microformats being developed, and that’s how the semantic web will be built, I believe.

[28] Computer scientist and entrepreneur, Rohit Khare stated that reduce, reuse, and recycle is "shorthand for several design principles" that motivated the development and practices behind microformats.

One advocate of microformats, Tantek Çelik, characterized a problem with alternative approaches: Here's a new language we want you to learn, and now you need to output these additional files on your server.

[32] Microformats2 was intended to make it easier for authors to publish microformats and for developers to consume them, while remaining backwards compatible[33] Using microformats2, the example above would be marked up as: and: