Microformats

Microformats are the older semantic markup approach for (X)HTML: meaning is added through class attributes on existing elements rather than through dedicated attributes.

<span class="adr">16 Leo Tolstoy St., Moscow</span>

The robot reads the class name as the name of a property defined by the microformat, and treats the element’s contents as its value. No new markup structure is required — the class is attached to HTML that already exists.

What Yandex supports

Two formats only:

• hCard — contact information: addresses, telephone numbers, organisation details.
• hRecipe — culinary recipes.

Microformats exist for many other domains — products, reviews, events — but those are not processed here. Anything outside hCard and hRecipe should be expressed in Schema.org instead.

Microformats or Schema.org?

Yandex answers this directly elsewhere in its documentation: the algorithms do not prefer either, so the convenient one is acceptable — but Schema.org is recommended as the more modern, fuller and actively developing standard. In practice that settles it for new work. Microformats matter mainly when maintaining a site that already uses them, where the class attributes are woven into templates and rewriting them buys nothing.

Validation

The structured data validator in the console reads both formats, which makes it possible to confirm that an existing hCard is still parsing correctly after a template change — a check worth running after any redesign of a contact page.

Why the distinction still matters

Because a class attribute is also a styling hook. A developer renaming adr to something more consistent with the design system silently removes the markup, and nothing about the page looks different. Schema.org attributes have no other purpose, so they survive refactoring better — which is the strongest practical argument for the newer standard.