[uf-discuss] RE: microformats for groups and group memberships?

[Chris Messina]

On 8/11/06, Jim Dalton <jim at ere.net> wrote:

> One thing I noticed on the examples I was looking at and posted (aside from
> almost zero semantic markup) was that member lists often exist in a location
> separate from the main "group" page. frequently, with long lists of members,
> the member lists can be spread across multiple pages, often with different
> URIs then the original group page.

This is where you have to look at what the representation of the
group's URI is... which goes to the concept of authority in
microformats -- The One True Issue.

Heh. I'm so clever.

But anyway, the concept of XFN resides on the notion that everyone you
know has some kind of URI -- typically in the form of a URL. (this is
why OpenID and XFN are best buddies).

So if the group has a URL, then we can do some *things* to show
relationships... on a member's blog they might do this to express
membership:

<a href="http://mygroupliveshere.com" rev="founder moderator member">Joe Bob</a>

At mygroupliveshere.com you might see a member listing, reciprocating
the relationship (a weak claim):

<ul class="xoxo">
  <li><a href="http://mulettesgalore.com" rel="founder moderator
member">Joe Bob</a></li>
</ul>

Now, that's how XFN plays a role.

You might be able to use something on the group homepage like hAtom to
contain an hcard to denote the group name and description... And in
within the hcard entry, you could list the members using XFN. How
you'd handle paginated member lists, I'm not sure, but I'm guessing
that you could stem the URL so that all XFN members under a certain
URL stem could be presumed to be members, like on Flickr:

http://flickr.com/groups/microformats/members

or Ma.gnolia:

http://ma.gnolia.com/groups/microformats/people

Just some extemporaneous brainstorming.

Chris

-- 
Chris Messina
Agent Provocateur, Citizen Agency &
  Open Source Ambassador-at-Large
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