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

Wed Dec 13 16:42:55 PST 2006

Scott Reynen [scott at randomchaos.com]
> 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.  

Assuming that the equivalent of Profile URIs were allowed on elements within
a <body> tag for those who can't access the <html> element, it would provide
at least two practical benefits:

1.) It would allow someone who is not immersed in the Microformats process
to discover the specific microformat and learn more about it when viewing
source of an HTML page.
2.) More importantly, it would allow a parser to positively identify the use
of a specific microformat on a webpage and not have to infer the possibility
that it had discovered a specific microformat.

> 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.

I do agree that (something like) this is needed. One of my pet peeves is
specs that require a URI but don't require it to be a URL, i.e. resolvable
to documention and ideally metadata.

-- 
-Mike Schinkel
http://www.mikeschinkel.com/blogs/
http://www.welldesignedurls.org/