[microformats-discuss] Referencing hCards

[Ryan King]

On Jul 16, 2005, at 3:47 PM, brian suda wrote:
> 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.

So don't even try. Even your above example of using the type  
attribute falls into the same trap.

> ...
>
>>> 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,

Right. So, just spider XFN'ed links. So:

1. I link to you.
2. You have an hCard on your homepage OR
3. link to your hCard with rel="me"

voila! distributed addressbook with XFN + hCard.

> 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.

-ryan