Today it is Blog Action Day. One day to think about the environment. To think about what you can do for a better environment, even if it is a bit, since a better environment starts with yourself. The color green plays an important role in this, since almost everybody associates it with a better environment.

In the development of a web site green also plays a quite important role. Some people live for the green bar the W3C markup validator shows when a web page validates. The green color indicates everything is good, and that is also what a better environment is. Unfortunately nothing can be validated on how good they are for the environment, even web sites not.

Another green aspect of web development are Microformats. Microformats help people and computers interact with each other much easier, they are more balanced. Thinking about the environment also about getting a better balance between you and everything around you.

For the server-side programmers, I have this one: PEAR. Their web site is green, but that’s not the only equality between PEAR and a better environment. PEAR allows every developer to share and grab code others developed. Developers can learn and safe time by looking at code by others, or be nice for colleague developers by sharing their code. A greener world also is good for others, and people can learn from nature in many ways.

I almost forgot graphic designers. It’s a fact a higher percentage of the designers uses an Apple Mac. So it is good to know Apple was tackled down by Greenpeace to build greener Apples. It is a result of the Green My Apple website.

Concluding I can say web designers and developers can help the world to be much greener. If you have more ideas, I would love to hear: just drop a comment.

Two appendices and one chapter from the book Microformats: Empowering Your Markup For Web 2.0 are free to download. The book itself is for sale since today.

The first appendix contains the Microformat specification, while the second one covers the most frequent used patterns. The chapter is a guide to markup your code with geo information. User agents like search engines or Google Earth can these to view the addresses on maps, or add it to an address book.

At last! I added some (actually one) Mircoformats to my about page. Helped with these tutorials, I had done it within just five minutes.

Roger said in the hCard tutorial:

The hCard markup has no impact on how the HTML is rendered by a browser.

But the hCard markup has a huge (positive) impact on the ability of web tools to meaningfully process the information in the HTML document.

So also prepare for the next web, use some Microformats…

For those who are not yet familiar with the term Microformats, there is a new web page called Why Microformats.

Information about what it is, how it works etc. can be found here. Also, there is a blog about it with updates.