[microformats-discuss] Referencing hCards

[brian suda]

Ryan King wrote:

> On Jul 16, 2005, at 1:32 PM, brian suda wrote:
>
>> One idea for referencing remote hCards was to use the rel="hcard" 
>> attribute.
>
> There's a couple of difficulties with this.
>
> First of all, rel="" defines the relationship between the two 
> resources, not the format of the target.

You are absolutely right. There is the HTML 'type' attribute for
content-type of the resulting link, but like 'hreflang' there is no way
to control someone else's content. So i guess i ment:
<a href="../hcard.html" type="text/hCard">Another hCard</a>

> Second, page A can't assert anything about the format of page B in 
> any reliable manner.

This is absolutely true.

>> 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 definitely sounds like an interesting idea for X2V to support.

It should be built-in already for both extracting a single VEVENT and a
single VCARD

>> 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.
>
>
> If we're building a network, why not just use XFN?

XFN just shows relationships between two people ('websites'), but the
hCard would also build a distributed address book.

> Yes, it makes sense, but I don't think the rel="hcard" is necessary 
> in any of it. First of all, its unreliable (which was the point I was 
> trying to make above) and secondly, a spider could just hit all of 
> your friends links to find hcards.

The unreliablity is certainly a factor. I would perfer NOT to spider all
links, otherwise i might be traversing the internet. It could be limited
to a depth of 1, but that is still un-needed work or bandwidth.

-brian