[microformats-discuss] Declaring the use of microformats with XHTML

Thu Oct 6 09:54:41 PDT 2005

On 10/6/05, David Janes -- BlogMatrix <davidjanes at blogmatrix.com> wrote:
> This is an idea that's been kicking around in my head for the last two
> months, so I'm just throwing it out there for discussion.
>
> Would it be a good [bad/indifferent] idea to require declaration in the
> XHTML header that certain microformats are in use? The positive points I
> see from this are:
>
> - scripts, such as Greasemonkey ones, won't unnecessarily scan through
> XHTML documents looking for information that is not there; after all,
> it's reasonable to expect that if this all works out, there could be
> hundreds of possible microformats, many developed in a decentralized
> manner or perhaps even one off (like within a corporate environment)
> - reducing the possibility of 'accidental' recognition of microformats
> that really aren't (for example, a listing of someone's Holiday CARDs).
>
> This could be done with a header link [1] to the XMDP profile, for example.
>
> <html>
> <head>
> <link
>   rel="microformat"
>   title="hcard"
>   href="http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-profile.xmdp" />
> ...
>
> There may also be need a profile [2] added to the <head> to make this
> happen.
>

This is, in fact currently done with the profile attribute of the head element.

In XHTML2.0, it looks like this will get nicer by moving into a link

http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-metaAttributes.html#s_metaAttributesmodule

- Luke