XMDP, @profile, and visible metadata (was Re: [uf-discuss] Signalling use of microformats?)

Mon Feb 20 11:14:34 PST 2006

> On its surface this is a true statement, and while the *proper* way to
> indicate presence of microformats is also invisible:
>
> <head profile="microformatProfileURL1 microformatProfileURL2 ...">
>
> ...we are exploring alternatives which would allow these declarations to be
> visible with rel="profile" hyperlinks.

These declarations can *already* be visible, assuming you're OK with
inlining the XMDP markup. @profile is defined by HTML 4 [1] to contain
whitespace-separated %URI;, and %URI; is defined [2] as both relative and
full URIs. So you could do something like this:

        <head profile="#profile">

and then somewhere in your document have

        <dl id="profile" class="profile"> ... </dl>

So you get visible profile data. But this is suboptimal; as XMDP doesn't
define any mechanism for "including" other XMDP profiles, you'd have to
inline the concatenation of all of the profiles you'd like to use, and
this gets really ugly really fast.

If XMDP could be extended to include a mechanism for including other
XMDP profiles (perhaps with rel="profile" in some way), then documents
could contain a @profile to an in-document XMDP which links to all of
the profiles used by the document. This would also let us duck the issue
that @profile is being redefined (by the W3C, not WHAT-WG) down to
containing only a single URI.

Ted

1. http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/global.html#adef-profile
2. http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/types.html#type-uri

-- 
Edward O'Connor
hober0 at gmail.com

Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem.