[microformats-discuss] question regarding MF enclosing attributes

Fri Jul 22 01:20:25 PDT 2005

On 7/21/05 1:22 PM, "Bud Gibson" <bud at thecommunityengine.com> wrote:

> Many microformats have a class attribute value indicating that the
> affected element encloses markup belonging to that microformat.

Rather, is an object as defined in that microformat specification.  E.g.
hCard defines that elements with a class name of "vcard" indicate an
hCard/vCard object.

> XFN  
> uses the URL of its XMDP as this value.

Not quite.

XFN is a simple elemental microformat which uses the 'rel' attribute on
hyperlinks.  That's it.

Both hCard *and* XFN have XMDP profiles which SHOULD be referenced by the
'profile' attribute on the <head> element per XMDP.

There are some ideas/thoughts/proposals to extend this to allow additional
ways of specifying which profile(s) are in use by the content, and those
proposals are under consideration for a future revision of XMDP.

> A very practical motivation for this question is that I am in the
> process of embedding xFolk in an RSS 2.0 feed and would like a
> compact representation to indicate the microformat is in use and
> where information about it can be found.

Bud, that is an excellent specific use case, and that's exactly the kind of
thing we need to distinguish endless academic wishlists from practical
implementation needs. I've added it to the wiki.

For now, I suggest simply embedding the xFolk in the RSS 2.0 feed and see
how it works.  See what *practical* problems you run into (if any), and
please report back!

Thanks,

Tantek