URI profiles [was RE: [uf-discuss] Comments from IBM/Lotus repabout Microformats]

Wed Dec 13 10:09:18 PST 2006

--
Joe Andrieu
joe at andrieu.net
+1 (805) 705-8651

Scott Reynen wrote:
> So profile URIs are described here:
> 
> http://microformats.org/wiki/profile-uris
> 
> where it says:
> 
> "it is ACCEPTED that each microformat should have a profile URI."
> 
> I agree it would help to make that more clear, but if you're  
> suggesting we change that "should" to a "must," I'd ask you what  
> practical benefit you expect publishers would gain from such a  
> change.  We're trying to avoid solving hypothetical problems here,  
> and I don't see a practical problem profile URIs solve yet, as I  
> haven't noticed anyone using class="vcard" to designate their  
> Valentine's Day cards or anything else other than hCard.  If you're  
> interested in seeing wider adoption of profile URIs, I'd recommend  
> work on filling in the XMDPs for every microformat, because it  
> wouldn't make much sense to require publishers to point to profiles  
> which don't exist.

Versioning is one practical problem, although the example Steve Marshall
brought up with hListing would suggest that you are absolutely right: we
should create XMDP profiles for every microformat.  And it is certainly
within the realm of anyone who cares about this to do so.

However, can't we also use profile URIs for disambiguation even without
the XMDPs, in the same way that rel="tag" works or namespace references
use a URI without requiring the URI resolve?  

<head profile='http://gmpg.org/xmdp/samplehtmlprofile.html'>

That works for versioning and disambiguation regardless of whether or
not the URI actually resolves.

In other words, could we standardize the URI for "official" microformats
so that they can be used in disambiguation and versioning?  That would
also give let us know where we should put the official profiles.

http://microformats.org/wiki/profiles/hcard
http://microformats.org/wiki/profiles/hcard
http://microformats.org/wiki/profiles/hcard