[uf-dev] Discovery of Microformatted documents

Mon May 5 02:09:39 PDT 2008

Julian Bond wrote:

> We've been looking at ways of discovering microformatted documents.  
> The
> requirement is to be able to say something like "My Profile page is at
> this URL".

Probably something like:

	<a href="http://link.to.profile.invalid/me" type="text/html"
	rel="me meta">Link to my profile</a>

is the best way to link to a page which contains metadata about you.  
(rel=meta is formally defined in the XHTML 2 drafts, but has been  
used for years by the Dublin Core and FOAF communities to indicate a  
page which contains relevant metadata.)

> This page http://www.gmpg.org/xfn/join seems to suggest
> http://gmpg.org/xfn/11 as a relatively permanent URI to use for XFN  
> but
> it wouldn't distinguish between cases 2 and 3.
>
> This page http://microformats.org/wiki/profile-uris defines some URI
> candidates as well. But I think my requirement is at a slightly higher
> level.

The term "profile" used on those pages has nothing to do with  
"personal profiles". It refers to the (rarely used) "profile"  
attribute of the <head> element which is used to link to one or more  
documents that describe the way that you're using HTML. For example:

	<head profile="http://gpmp.org/xfn/11">

may be used to indicate that when you write 'rel="contact"', you are  
using the definition of 'rel="contact"' which can be found in XFN  
1.1, and not, say, the entirely different definition of  
'rel="contact"' which the current HTML 5 drafts use.

In terms of microformats, the <head profile> attribute can be thought  
of as a place to list which microformats you use on the page, so that  
parsers can distinguish between an intentional use of hCard and a co- 
incidental use of 'class="vcard"' by someone who's never even heard  
of hCard.

-- 
Toby A Inkster
<mailto:mail at tobyinkster.co.uk>
<http://tobyinkster.co.uk>