hreview

hReview is a microformat used to mark up user reviews in HTML so that machines can extract review data from ordinary web pages. It was developed as part of the microformats initiative to embed semantic information directly in human-readable content. hReview is designed to describe reviews of items such as products, services, venues, or other objects, and it supports both individual reviews and aggregated ratings (the latter represented by hReview-aggregate).

A typical hReview markup uses class attributes to annotate content. The root element has the hreview class, with nested elements describing the reviewed item (often using an item or name class), the rating (a numeric value or range), a short summary, a longer description, and the date of the review. The reviewer is usually represented via a nested vCard structure, for example a reviewer element containing the reviewer’s formatted name. Optional properties may include the item’s URL and additional metadata about the rating or the item itself.

History and status: hReview was introduced in the mid-2000s by members of the microformats community, including Tantek Çelik, and became part of the microformats 1 effort. It saw adoption on various blogs, product pages, and directories seeking machine-readable reviews. In recent years, use of hReview has declined in favor of schema.org markup (such as Product and Review types) and JSON-LD, which are more widely supported by major search engines. The hReview specification remains a documented part of the microformats ecosystem on microformats.org, but it is less commonly implemented on new pages today.