[microformats-discuss] Profiles status

[brian suda]

I have run into the same problem, i started a universal Microformats
parser that would fetch the XMDP parse it and show you what it found.
(You can't really do much in the way of validation, i menetioned many of
these problems and pitfalls early on[3][4], on this list. Just remember
that this is human-readable first, machine-readable second).

http://suda.co.uk/projects/XMDP/


Danny Ayers wrote:

>... So could someone please tell which microformats have profile URIs, and
>which have usable profile documents (before I start wondering what
>problem XMDP solves ;-)
>  
>
--- i know GRDDL has a profile[1] and so does XFN[2], hCard and hCal
will be getting a profile, but the spec is just being finalised.

>Makes me wonder how everyone is going about determining a particular
>doc is using a particular microformat.Is anyone finding this out
>automatically? How, just matching on class attribute contents? Or is
>it simply that no-one's got around to consuming them yet..?
>  
>
--- i think that it is difficult to force things. I remember somewhere
saying that a high number of sites listed in RubHub either had the
profile with no XFN, or XFN with no profile. It is a bad idea to assume
a CSS class named 'url' is the url in hCard. Without an explicit
profile, you can never be 100% certain the user ment for certain values
were ment for certain semantics.


I know there has been talk about using GRDDL to make RDF from XMDP so
more assertions could be made. There has also been talk of several other
additional things that could be layered onto XMDP so that as small OWL
(ontology) could be build so without a doubt the URL in hCard is the
same URL in hCal. In addition to things like that, XFN allows for
references that SHOULD be transitive, or non-transitive, and there is no
way to express these besides English-prose (at the moment).

Being that people are just now figuring out the power of microformats
within HTML, I think these sort of things are currently over the heads
of most people (which doesn't mean we shouldn't stop talking about
them). Getting into big-picture semantic web will come slowly. The
microformat.org volunteers are very busy, these are all things on the To
Do list, so please keep documenting these things on the Wiki, and they
will get flushed out.

-brian

[1] - http://www.w3.org/2003/g/data-view
[2] - http://gmpg.org/xfn/11
[3] -
http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2005-July/000306.html
[4] -
http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2005-July/000346.html