Microformats in Blogger - hAtom support

Those of you who read my blog directly, rather than via a feed-reader, will notice that it is looking styled again, for the first time since CSS Naked Day in April.

I made an initial conversion to hAtom by hand in the meantime, but a few weeks back Michał Cierniak and I checked in a change to the underlying Blogger templates to make hAtom the default, which the Blogger team graciously accepted. This should enable much simpler client-side parsing of the blog pages. One thing we had to do to enable this was to add a new datatype to output a date in the W3C's ISO-8601 profile, as expected by hAtom. If you look in the templates now, you'll see markup like this:

<abbr class='published' expr:title='data:post.timestampISO8601'> <data:post.timestamp/></abbr>

If you want to make your own hAtom friendly templates, you can use the data:post.timestampISO8601 appropriately in the date-time design pattern; the data:post.timestamp will reflect your personal formatting preferences as before.