[uf-discuss] User Profile Microformat

[Julian Bond]

Kevin Lawver <kevin at lawver.net> Fri, 30 Dec 2005 15:44:03
>I was looking at hCard today (and around the web) looking for ideas 
>around a user profile microformat.

Ecademy is a big creator of this data. I've tried to find ways of doing 
this (within the limits of privacy) without a lot of success. We have 
FOAF and VCard[1] already and wanted to provide a microformat way of 
doing this. I ended up thinking I should have a separate page with 
profiles formatted in html for printing and with the embedded 
microformat for machine reading. But a big problem was the limitations 
of both vCard and FOAF in describing all the data.

I'm really puzzled that there isn't a better web standardised way of 
describing a person. With all the work going on around Single Signon 
from the likes of OpenID, SXIP, LID, MS and so on, we need a 
standardised way of transferring that data.

[1]Don't get me started on the extremely variable support for vCard. 
Apps that support it are very picky about reading and writing it.

-- 
Julian Bond  E&MSN: julian_bond at voidstar.com  M: +44 (0)77 5907 2173
Webmaster:           http://www.ecademy.com/     T: +44 (0)192 0412 433
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