[uf-discuss] Some hcard feedback from a vCard implementor

[Brian Suda]

On 4/4/06, Sam Roberts <sroberts at uniserve.com> wrote:

> I wouldn't even now how to begin encoding a vCard as an hCard, and it
> doesn't sound like there is any reason to. Would an hcard even exist,
> standalone?
>

--- i think you answer your own question in another email, but just
incase anyone else is still confused....

Q: Would an hcard even exist, standalone?
A: One of the benefits of keeping an hCard is that it is very easy to
parse because it is in XML. If you keep your data in XHTML and are
staring at it every day you are VERY likely to see problems and update
it quicker than if you wrote that FoaF file last year when it was hot,
that you never look at anymore. Because vCard, and hence hCard, is a
well define/used standard and it is written in XHTML, it makes it easy
to move between formats. I can use XSLT to convert it to a vCard, or
an RDF representation of a vCard or FoaF (with some help from XFN), or
to XML, or to CSV, etc. I prefer keeping ONLY an hCard and using
webservices to generate the other files as needed. (you can easily do
this with mod-rewrite[1] and hide it from the end user).

It is "a kind of internal markup inside XHTML, rather than what [you]
think of as an XML format..."

-brian

[1] - http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-faq
--
brian suda
http://suda.co.uk