[uf-discuss] Avatar Microformat ?

[Ryan King]

On Nov 24, 2005, at 3:43 PM, Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote:

> Hello,
>
> On 11/24/05, Chris Messina <chris.messina at gmail.com> wrote:
>> My first reaction was also to simply use vCard. The question then
>> becomes whether you can have multiple photo fields in one hCard...  
>> per
>> the vCard spec.
>
> I don't know if a vCard would be the best way to go for this.  (Maybe
> something more basic that a vCard could make use of.)

Remember, you don't have to use everything from the vCard vocabulary  
when using hCard.

> Consider the blogging sites that teenagers tend to use.  (Like myspace
> or nexopia.)  They typically have "picures" loaded into there (on the
> user's profile page)... like a gallery... that don't have anything to
> do with contact info or anything like that.  These images are often
> used as avatars.
>
>> Additionally, I worry that in terms of the 80-20 rule, most people
>> will not have many avatars and therefore a single representation in
>> your hCard would be sufficient.
>
> I've found that most people have alot of avatars and change them quite
> often.  It seems to be especially common amoung those from "generation
> Y" and younger.  And as these people get older, this will become more
> common.
>
> I terms of the demographic I'm interested in, most the people in this
> "younger demographic" do have multiple avatars; and they tend to
> change them quite alot.
>
>> Microformats are for general purpose use, like flour and sugar. Using
>> them you can build things as interesting as pizza or as simple as
>> bread. However, a microformat for pizza would probably be
>> inappropriate or not worth standardizing since its fundamental
>> ingredients can be broken down further into more atomic units.
>
> Agreed, but I think an "avatar" microformat is pretty basic.  It could
> be a simple as something like rel-avatar.
>
>> Avatars are simply hCard photos --
>
> I disagree.  In fact, I'd say that hCards could use an avatar
> microformat for it's photo.

I disagree, I think the PHOTO (or LOGO) property work fine for this  
use case.

-ryan
--
Ryan King
ryan at technorati.com