Microformats feel like they're ugly retrofitted kludges, where it would have been way more elegant if in among all the crazy helter-skelter competing development of HTML, someone thought to invent a <person> tag, maybe a <organisation> tag. That would have solved a few problems that <blink> certainly didn't.
They certainly are retrofitted, but the existing semantic tags are largely abandoned for div soups that are beaten into shape and submission by lavish amounts of JS and a few sprinkles of CSS (and the latter often as CSS-in-JS). For microformats there is at least a little ecosystem already, and the vendor-driven committees don't need to be involved.
Nothing at all. I believe you don't even need to use web components. You can just throw in <my-person>Joe Bloggs</my-person> and that's valid HTML-whatever.
But it's not a standard that is recognised, and so is no kind of metadata format.
Neither were microformats, up until a handful of aggregators started parsing them. We're still kind of stuck in the infancy of semantic markup it seems.
