[uf-discuss] OpenSearch

David Janes davidjanes at blogmatrix.com
Wed Aug 30 06:36:33 PDT 2006


There's no explicit MIME type for hAtom markedup html, excepting of
course "text/html", and of course a html document may be marked up
with several different microformats (othoganally or composited), so a
new MIME type probably isn't the solution.

The reason I think that (2) is needed is:

(a) profiles are not manditory, so we can't depend on their presence
(b) the search-results consumer, knowing that there is hAtom search
results, may want not to read the URL at all (prefering a proxy to do
it)
(c) there is and will continue to be pages that have HTML but not hAtom

Regards, etc...
David
http://blogmatrix.blogmatrix.com

On 8/30/06, Edward Summers <ehs at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Aug 30, 2006, at 12:28 AM, David Janes wrote:
> > (2) one could add an extra field to the OpenSearch XML (a description
> > file about how your results are returned) indicating that the file is
> > hAtom
>
> I'm glad someone posted about this--hAtom and OpenSearch seem like a
> natural combination. It's also very cool to hear about opensearch
> support at yahoo.
>
> I don't think (2) is necessary since the type attribute on the Url
> tag [1] does just this. The OpenSearch spec defers to the MIME type
> registry for valid values of 'type' and 'application/atom+html' isn't
> there. There isn't a MIME type for hAtom is there?
>
> To simplify things couldn't hSearch recommend that 'text/html' be
> used and let clients either choose to use the hAtom or just display
> as normal?  Is there any real benefit to having an opensearch client
> know they can get hAtom in a response? Isn't the whole point of
> microformats that they are discovered in existing human readable web
> data and not explicitly requested?
>
> I don't see any immediate benefit in creating a microformat for the
> OpenSearch Description xml since autodiscovery makes it easy to
> locate and use. But I could be convinced otherwise.
>
> It would be great to have an hSearch page that outlined the optimal
> way to use hAtom with OpenSearch. Is this something that belongs on
> the wiki?


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