For a second year in a row, there's a report ranking all law school home pages accredited by the ABA. Read the results online for 2009 and 2010. One element surveyed for all schools is the use of Microformats, which is a design pattern used to semantically mark up data online. Common uses are to use hCard to represent contact and address information, as well as hCalendar to represent events and calendars. Future browser versions might integrate microformats support, and if you use a browser add-on like Tails or Operator your browser can quickly find an address on Google maps or let you efficiently add items to your calendar. It's great to see more schools use microformats, and this is progress towards the oft-mentioned semantic web.
In 2009, four law schools used at least one microformat on the home page. In 2010, the number grew to thirteen.
Following is a list with links to the schools using microformats, together with a note on the format being used. Google supports microformats, they've seen the use of rich snippets growing (which includes RDFa and microformats), and as far back as 2008, Yahoo! started indexing this semantic content online. Also, some suggest that microformats help with website SEO. It will be interesting to see if more schools use this design pattern for events and addresses. Who knows? Sites may some day use something like hReview to mark up professor or course reviews.
Law School Home Pages Using Microformats in 2010
- American University: hCalendar
- Emory University: hCard partially implemented
- Catholic University of America: hCard
- Cornell University: hCalendar
- Michigan State University College of Law: hCard
- New York Law School: hCard
- University of California at Davis: hCard - with no street address
- University of Denver: hCard
- University of Maine: hCard - for admissions and main law school address
- University of South Dakota: hCard - for law school and main university
- University of Southern California: hCard
- University of Virginia: hCard
- Wayne State University: hCard - for law school and main university
Internet Explorer users have a new tool to make use of
where it's fairly easy to add content and context is by using 