I gave a talk with the title, "Hands-on Microformats: Quickly build an hCalendar-based view" at the 2009 BarCamp Omaha . Since the presentation was really looking at code, I didn't have a slide deck. So I thought I would share my notes in a series of posts. This is the first. Short version: By adding a few specific attributes and abiding by some date formatting rules, you can generate a great-looking monthly calendar with surprisingly little effort. That is, get something like this: From HTML that looks like this: A microformat lets you use standard XHTML but add in some semantic goodness without resorting to a separate XML namespace and corresponding set of tags (or formally, an XML application ). For our example, hCalendar uses a 1:1 representation of standard iCalendar ( RFC2445 ) VEVENT properties and values in semantic XHTML . hCalendar wouldn't have caught my attention if it weren't for js-hCalendar . This bit of JavaScript created by David Glasser and ho