[uf-dev] Discovery of Microformatted documents

[Julian Bond]

Toby A Inkster <mail at tobyinkster.co.uk> Mon, 5 May 2008 10:09:39
>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.)

OK. We're trying to do something slightly different. The use case is to 
find relevant documents (in this case microformat marked up html) during 
the initial signup to a new site using openid. Openid has a discovery 
mechanism using XRDS files. These XRDS files seem like a good place to 
put links to things like:-
- The page with my profile on it (hcard)
- The page with a list of the other profiles I have (rel="me")
- The page with a list of all my contacts (rel="contact")

The XRDS format expects a URI to identify the type of service and a 
media type. If those documents are HTML then the media type is simple. 
Then it has a URL field for the location of the page described. But we 
would need URIs for those cases above.

The best URIs to use for Type seem to be
http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/
http://gmpg.org/xfn/11#me
http://gmpg.org/xfn/11#contact
respectively. I'm suggesting using the anchors to distinguish between a 
page primarily about other profiles and one primarily about a list of 
contacts.

I don't remember seeing anything before about discovery of microformat 
documents. As you've described, you could put a <link rel="me meta" link 
into the page at the location of the human entered openid. We're not 
trying to prevent that but to also use the XRDS file that is already 
being read.

The key point here is that this is about discovery. We're not trying to 
identify a type of a document already being read. We're talking about a 
Type identifier on a document to be collected.

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