South by Southwest Interactive - Day 1

I got to Austin and checked into my hotel a lot earlier than I expected. Stoked I was going to make it to Dustin Diaz's reading of Pro JavaScript Design Patterns, I went down to the convention center to get my badge and go in, but the line to check in took over an hour. So I missed Dustin's presentation.

But, I did make it to Aarron Walter's Building Findable Websites reading. It was pretty much your standard lecture on SEO/accessibility best practices, but there seemed to be a lot of emphasis on microformats. While I am a fan of microformats, I don't see how they make it any easier to find a website for the average user. The only people who are taking advantage of microformats are the types of people would be here at SXSW - and they are more than capable at finding the information without microformats.

Eventually, browsers will likely have native support for microformats (it was mentioned that Firefox 3 will), but even then, I don't see it being very beneficial to non-computer geeks. Hopefully I'm wrong.

The one thing I did learn (or was told) though was that search engines don't really like code. Semantic markup is (usually?) cleaner and lighter than your standard div-itis HTML markup. Search engines appreciate this low code-to-content ratio, and reward the page with a higher page ranking. It makes sense - the easier it is for a search engine to index a page, the better it's going to parse and index that page and its content.