UltraNormal

I was asked by someone at work to come up with a non-technical definition of microformats for some glossary of web terms they're putting together. Here's what I came up with:

Using standards that exist today, microformats take the HTML used to build the web and turn it into powerful, semantic, machine-readable, web-service ready data - without changing the specification or changing how HTML is written or delivered.

And here's what the amazing Paul Downey came up with on Twitter

Microformats for non-techies: colours on a Web page for things such as "date" and "telephone number" which only computers can see

I like Paul's better. Oh, and you should check out Paul's presentation on Web API's. The man creates the best slides in the business.