hentry

hentry is a microformat class used to annotate individual blog entries or posts in HTML documents. It provides a machine-readable way to convey post-level metadata such as the title, content, summary, author, publication date, and permalink, enabling simple extraction by software without custom parsing.

In typical usage, a single post is wrapped in an element marked with the class hentry, and its parts are labeled with specific class names such as entry-title for the title, entry-content for the full text, and entry-summary for a brief excerpt. The author may be represented by an embedded h-card or a related author field, and the publication date is indicated with a suitable date-related markup. The exact markup varies by implementation, but the goal is to make core post data easily discoverable.

History and context: hentry emerged as part of the original microformats specifications developed in the mid-2000s, led by people like Tantek Çelik. It was popular in early blogging platforms as a lightweight way to mark up posts for feed readers and aggregators, without requiring script-heavy solutions.

Relation to other formats: hentry is closely tied to hAtom, which describes how blog pages and feeds can be annotated, and to hCard for representing author information. In later efforts, microformats2 introduced a revised h-entry vocabulary with different class names (for example, p-name, e-content, u-url). As web standards evolved, many sites migrated to schema.org and JSON-LD, but hentry remains a notable part of the history of semantic markup on the web and is encountered in legacy pages and discussions of microformats.