[microformats-discuss] Referencing hCards

[brian suda]

One idea for referencing remote hCards was to use the rel="hcard" attribute.

With the X2V program and the id='' attribute it is possible to reference
a single hCard within an HTML page with many hCards.

<div class="vcard" id="brian_suda">
...
</div>

by passing http://example.com/hcard.html#brian_suda to X2V i would get a
single vCard result instead of all the vCards that would be encoded into
that page.

This could also lead to the following link on
http://another.site.example.com/:

<a href="http://example.com/hcard.html#brian_suda" rel="me hcard">my
hCard</a>

This gives a link to an HTML page, but it is an anchor directly to the
hCard. The idea being, that X2V could then also search for any
rel="hcard" attributes and spider those links as well. Then you could
build a disconnected network of hCard nodes.

One vCard attribute rarely used is AGENT. This is a person that acts on
the other person's behalf.

<div class="vcard" id="brian_suda">
<a href='http://agents.site.example.com/#agent1' class="agent"
rel="hcard">contact my agent</a>
</div>

Now X2V could travers that link to get the rest of the agent hcard. This
allows the agent to keep their information up-to-date on their site
without me constantly making changes to my own site. Instead i reference
their hcard via an href anchor link.

Another example would be a single HTML page with links to all my
friends' hcard pages. If i add the rel="hcard" attribute to each link,
then point X2V to my own page. X2V would spider all of the external
links and fetch the hcards building a vcard for each one. Then i no
longer need to keep friends data current. It is a distributed
addressbook via REST, microformats, and HTML.

Does this make sense? Any thoughts?
-brian