As announced in the Yahoo Local blog, Yahoo Local now supports microformats.

Starting today, we’re happy to announce Yahoo! Local fully supports the hCalendar, hCard, and hReview microformats on almost all business listings, search results, events, and reviews. There are a few reasons behind this change, which for now, will be transparent to almost everyone.

In less-techy terms, “microformats” are an open standard for structuring web page content in a meaningful and reusable way. At Yahoo, we’ve been big microformat fans — Yahoo! Tech uses the hReview microformat for all product reviews, Flickr supports XFN and hCard on all profile pages, and our own Upcoming.org was the first big hCalendar supporter.

We believe in giving you more control over your data and the user experience on Yahoo! Local. With our microformat support, we’ve opened up new data and new possibilities for the developer community to build upon, to make tools that will be genuinely useful to all our users.

This is an exciting development and sign of building momentum behind microformats. Microformats are a way to achieve the vision of a machine readable semantic web without requiring significant changes in end user and authoring behavior. It will be great to see microformats extended to all of the toolsets people use to author content.