[uf-discuss] hAtom draft

[Benjamin Carlyle]

David,

On Thu, 2005-12-22 at 14:54 -0500, David Janes wrote:
> On Tuesday, December 20, 2005 3:33 PM, Ryan King wrote:
> > Yes. Many personal blogs will have author data in one place on the  page 
> > (like mine, in the footer: http://theryanking.com/blog/).
> More in general, people put their real address elsewhere.

True. I found one example in my earlier survey where the only useful
complete vcard information was off-page.

> It would be cool 
> if there was a standardized way to do
> <a
>   class="author vcard fn"
>   rel="vcard"
>   href=http://theryanking.com/blog/contact/
> >Ryan King</a>.

Interestingly, this might even work for vcards on the same page. Suppose
we have a list of entries wrapped in a feed element, but the "About Me"
is somewhere else on the page. It might be useful to say:

<a class="author" rel="vcard" href="#aboutMe">Author Name</a>

I suspect this would be straightforward to include in any current
"posted by" entry header or footer. I would even be inclined to
associate my signoff with a card (I would just have to move it outside
the content div). The human-visible effect may be reasonble also,
although it would change the visible attributes of the page slightly.
Humans would see new hyperlinks that jump to the "about me" page or
anchor.

I would suggest dropping vcard and fn from the class list as things are
currently written in the hAtom microformat page. If no vcard is present
in the author element the content is treated like an fn already, and
stating the vcard class may be confusing. A parser may assume this is
the full vcard and not interrogate the link.

One downside is that a parser that isn't willing to visit the "about me"
page (due to being offline or for some other reason), or isn't smart
enough to decypher the "about me" anchor (perhaps because it has thrown
that part of the document away already) may produce an abbreviated view
of the author vcard. Keeping the author name within the href mitigates
this problem by ensuring at least that is preserved.

-- 
Benjamin Carlyle <benjamincarlyle at optusnet.com.au>