[uf-discuss] Regarding Profile URIs and Disambiguation (was Comments from IBM/Lotus rep about Microformats)

Tue Dec 12 15:43:14 PST 2006

On Dec 12, 2006, at 4:52 PM, Mike Schinkel wrote:

> <div class="region-data vcard">
>  <div class="region street" title="child-of-city">
>   <div class="street-address">665 3rd St.</div>
>   <div class="extended-address">Suite 207</div>
>  </div>
>  <span class="region city locality" title="child-of-state">San
> Francisco</span>,
>  <span class="region state region"  title="child-of-country">CA</span>
>
>  <span class="post-code postal-code">94107</span>
>  <div class="region country country-name"
> title="child-of-continent">U.S.A.</div>
> </div>
>
> How to disambiguate with Profile URI? (Please make the assumption  
> that the
> developer of region-data knew nothing of vcard when region-data was
> published.)

As I've said before, I don't think this kind of same name, same  
document, different meaning conflict is solved by profile URIs  
(because they don't have namespaces).  But I also think it's both a  
rare and a bad practice to use one symbol to communicate two  
different ideas in a single context.

Nonetheless, in the interest of ending this discussion, here's what  
you can do to solve this problem whenever you encounter it:

1) add profiles for both vcard and region-data, e.g.:

	<head profile="http://www.w3.org/2006/03/hcard http://yourdomain.com/ 
region-data-profile">

2) add prefixes to all your region-data tags when you decide to add  
the conflicting hCard names, e.g.:

  	<span class="my-prefix-region my-prefix-city locality"  
title="child-of-state">San

3) designate that prefix in a meta tag, e.g.:

	<meta name="profile-prefixes" content="* my-prefix-" />

	(where * indicates no prefix for hcard)

4) convince developers of region-data parsers to look for prefixes

Note this won't require any changes to hCard.  Now you can go crazy  
with your double entendre markup and this list can move on with  
developing microformats to solve specific problems.  Sound good?

Peace,
Scott