[uf-discuss] A microformat for relationship availability and preference?

[Ciaran McNulty]

On 12/20/06, Angus McIntyre <angus at pobox.com> wrote:
> There are all kinds of inferences that it's dangerous to draw from an
> incomplete description.

I concur, Microformats allow us to publish information, but the
absence of them shouldn't be taken as conveying information.

> Which raises the whole question for me with XFN, which is a practical
> one, rather than a technical one: do we really want the world to know
> all that stuff about us?

Yes, quite.

Inherent in the Microformats movement is the desire to make
information easier to publish and aggregate, but people need to
consider carefully what parts they want to make available about
themselves and their relationships to others.

In my day job, I keep seeing places where an hCard would be useful
where organisations are publishing contact information, but far from
wanting to make it easily parsable they seem to put all their efforts
into trying to obfuscate it to avoid getting more spam!

-Ciaran McNulty