TownNews.com, which publishes interactive content for newspapers, will use hNews templates in its new BLOX Web-content-management system following the completion of the first draft of the microformat specification by The Associated Press, the two parties announced.

The nonproprietary, standards-based hNews microformat was developed by AP and British nonprofit Media Standards Trust to help the news industry adopt consistent news formats for online content.

AP vice president for technology and director of the AP news registry Todd Martin said:

hNews provides a consistent and higher-fidelity way of presenting news online and enables the semantic interpretation of news for humans and machines. It also enables news publishers to add enriched metadata—or tags—to their content to improve the user experience, attract audiences and advertisers and facilitate searching for specific types of content.