[uf-discuss] Is the world ready for head[profile]?

[Ryan King]

On Jul 16, 2006, at 8:38 PM, Ryan Cannon wrote:

> Greetings,
>
> I recently redesigned my site and had some wild ideas about  
> defining the loosely-collect @rel values I have on my site (pgpkey,  
> icon, pingback, editURI, etc.) as well as assorted Microformat  
> values for @rel that do not have formal XMDP set up already. The  
> long-term goal is to create a Firefox Extension/Greasemonkey Script/ 
> Bookmarklet that displays meaningful information for them. My  
> question is twofold:
>
> Why are most microformat profiles written in encoded html[1][2]? Is  
> this to show that they are only drafts?

Yes. Unfortunately, we have two different notions of 'profile'  
floating around. First, there's the HTML profile URIs, which are just  
URIs, they specify nothing about what the resource on that end of the  
URI means.

Then, we have XMDP documents, which are our solution to representing  
a profile in a resource.

We're currently at the point of having authored those documents (or,  
at least) drafts of them, but haven't gotten tot he point of minting  
and publishing URIs for them. The reason for this delay are several:

1. We want some degree of stability first.
2. There are more important things to work on and the microformats  
can grow and evolve without profiles. (if you disagree, you're more  
than welcome to volunteer to help with the profile URIs :D)

> Is it beneficial to create my xhtml metadata profiles and publish  
> them without submitting them to a standards body? Is their harm in  
> publishing xhtml metadata profiles willy-nilly?

There's no reason why you can't.

-ryan