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

Thu Oct 6 10:04:54 PDT 2005

On 10/6/05 9:54 AM, "Luke Arno" <luke.arno at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

Right, with

<head profile="PROFILEURL1 PROFILEURL2 ...">

This is discussed in the XMDP description:

 http://gmpg.org/xmdp/description

> 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

Yes, and indeed, we are considering simply adding rel="profile" to XMDP as
well.  I still have about 100 emails regarding that topic to digest and
attempt to summarize, so don't worry, I haven't forgotten about them.  For
any additional discussion on rel="profile", I would ask that folks check the
archives to see what has already been said, and hold off for a bit in the
hopes I can get that summary/conclusions written up which will hopefully
answer a bunch of questions.

Thanks,

Tantek