[microformats-discuss] URIs please!

[Joshua Porter]

On Jul 15, 2005, at 8:00 AM, brian suda wrote:

> Carl Beeth wrote:
>
>
>>> nor would we be
>>> able to do auto-discovery via the profile="...".
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Again sorry if this is a stupid question but what do we mean with
>> auto-discovery?
>>
>>
> My description of Auto-Discovery (which might not be the right
> description) would be a way for the UA (User-Agent) or plug-in to
> automatically display something to the user saying this page is  
> encoded
> with a microformat. Safari (and i think Firefox with a plugin) does  
> this
> with RSS. If you have something like <link rel="rss"
> href="link.to/feed.rss"/> Safari will add a small blue RSS icon in the
> title bar. There is a GeoURL plug-in for Mozilla so when you surf to a
> page that is GeoURL encoded it displays a small globe in the lower
> right-hand corner which links to GeoURL.org with their lat/lon. With
> hCa* the auto-discovery would show a small vCard icon, or calendar  
> icon
> letting the user know if they click this it will scrap the page and  
> add
> the data to their PIM.

This is my interpretation of auto-discovery, too.

However, there is not consensus on this point:

---- earlier exchange------

> On Jul 13, 2005, at 8:08 AM, Tantek Çelik wrote:
>
>
>> On 7/12/05 2:12 PM, "Joshua Porter" <porter at bokardo.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>> Is it fair to say that microformats are no further along in auto-
>>> discovery than are standalone XML formats?
>>>
>>>
>>
>> I'm not sure that "auto-discovery" as you use it means the same
>> thing as
>> others use it to mean.  It is a bit of an overloaded term, and as
>> such, a
>> specific use-case would help with understanding what you mean.
>>
>
> I'm talking about auto-discovery in the sense that Safari and Firefox
> autodiscover RSS feeds and provide additional functionality to them.
> (Danny and Ryan answered this question by saying that browsers don't
> *currently* autodiscover them in this way.)
>

Ah.  Then the question doesn't make sense as defined, since  
microformats are
used *in* the content, not somewhere else where a rel="alternate" link
points to.


--------end earlier exchange---------

Tantek seems to be saying that since microformats are embedded, then  
you can't auto-discover them like you can with RSS.

However, UAs that notify users of possible actions based on the  
microformats seems to be the right thing to do. If we don't call that  
auto-discovery, what other terms fit better? Auto-notification, perhaps?


>
> Ofcourse, auto-discovery is NOT just icons and pictures, it can be  
> used
> by other programs as well. NewsNetWire can use this to fetch RSS feeds
> without an actual link to the rss file, only to the homepage. Imagine
> using iCal and subscribing just to http://microformats.org, then the
> iCal will fetch and parse the HTML code, 'auto-discover' the iCal link
> and use that to sync with instead of the homepage link.

This sounds like using the index page as an index to all content,  
which feels like the way things are headed. However, if there is no  
explicit link to the content, publishers can't ever change where they  
publish their hCalendar, or there needs to be some sort of  
notification system in place in the case they do.

Not everyone will want to have their calendar information on their  
home page. From what I've gathered from folks on this list, one of  
the strengths of microformats is that they can be embedded on any page.

josh

>
> If someone is thinking auto-discovery is something different please  
> give
> your thoughts.
>
> -brian
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