I’ve been taking it easy today just practically invisibly improving the code on this website. The hAtom microformat was brought up recently on one of the WordPress mailing lists, so I thought I’d see about adding support for it here. It was actually rather straightforward: I didn’t even have to rename any of my CSS classes.
The only remaining issue (which is not really an issue at all) is that the post author is not showing up in the the microformat parser I’ve been using to test. According to the hAtom spec the default should come from the XHTML author, which according to my undestanding is specified using the <meta name="author"> tag. I’ve specifically added such a tag, as I don’t display the author in each post, since I feel it would be silly to repeat my name throughout the page.
Since the recommended author data format was hCard I added general support for it on all my pages, too.
As a side effect of all these changes I’ve also fixed a couple of the spots that used to render irritatingly poorly with the Lynx web browser. CSS with its display property was highly useful in keeping up appearances on the other browsers. “Extra” elements added for Lynx can easily be hidden with display: none;. As another example, while <p> is quite useful in adding some extra spacing in Lynx, it is often desirable to undo the effect on other browsers using display: inline;.