[uf-discuss] Plazes & Microformats

[Ryan King]

On Apr 19, 2006, at 12:45 PM, David Janes -- BlogMatrix wrote:
> Ryan King wrote:
>>> <a class="vcard" rel="vcard" href="/profile/fiahless/"><span  
>>> class="fn nickname">fiahless</span></a>
>>>
>>> To indicate that not only is this a vcard, but a better or  
>>> "reference" vcard is available at the other end of the link.
>> I like the idea of being able to hint at the presence of  
>> microformats in other documents. Certainly, it could make focused  
>> crawling for microformats a bit easier (in certain cases).
>> However, using @rel here seems like semantic abuse. From the spec[1]:
>>> This attribute describes the relationship from the current  
>>> document to the anchor specified by the href attribute. The value  
>>> of this attribute is a space-separated list of link types.
>> I'm not sure its reasonable to say that 'vcard' describes the  
>> relationship between these two documents.
>> It seems that the more semanticaly appropriate place to put this  
>> would be @type. However, I'm not sure I want to get into that.
>
> I disagree: it exactly specifies the relationship between VCARD-A  
> and VCARD-B: VCARD-B is the canonical or preferred rendering of  
> VCARD-A.

But the relationship isn't 'vcard'. 'vcard' describes the format (or  
part of the format) of the referenced resource, not the relationship  
between the two.

> We've already made the leap that "current document" means the uFed  
> object in question on the source side, cf. rel-tag.

Right, we've stretched @rel to apply to parts of documents, rather  
than whole documents. However, this isn't the problem I have with  
using 'vcard' as a rel value. The problem is that the typical @rel  
interpetation doesn't make sense. To illustrate:

In document A I have:

<a rel="tag" href="B">blah</a>

this can be inpreted as "B is a tag for A".

In this case:

<a rel="vcard" href="B">blah</a>

"B is a vcard for A" doesn't make sense. B *is* a vcard, even if A  
doesn't exist.

-ryan
--
Ryan King
ryan at technorati.com