[uf-discuss] hKit parsing library for PHP5

[Drew McLellan]

On returning from @media and lots of associated interesting hallway  
conversions, I sat down to hack on a microformat-related idea. It  
quickly became apparent that what should've been a couple of hours  
coding was going to take significantly longer because I had no  
toolkits to back me up. So I put my idea on hold, and thought I'd  
better get hacking on a parsing toolkit instead.

I poked around looking at stuff that's already out there, including  
Microformats Base, but I couldn't find anything that fitted the model  
I was after - namely chuck in a string or URL, and get out an array  
structure of, say, hCards.

So in the principal of release early, release often, here's what I'm  
calling hKit for PHP5 version 0.1.
http://allinthehead.com/code/hkit/hkit-v0.1.tgz

It depends on SimpleXML in PHP5, and really needs either the PHP Tidy  
functions or tidy on the local system (a configurable setting),  
otherwise you're depending on the page being valid. It uses a  
pluggable system of 'profiles' for each supported µF - the only one  
of which is hCard at the moment. The GetByURL() method supports URL  
fragment drilldown.

This really is way too early to be releasing, but if I don't now I  
probably never will. This really is a first pass, and bits of it are  
a bit hacky. Known limitations (ha!) are:

* Doesn't fully enforce all the parsing rules in hcard-parsing
* Doesn't support include pattern
* Doesn't resolve paths to absolute URLs on, say, images
* No architecure to post-process values yet - e.g. email begins with  
mailto:

All of which makes me ask, well what does it do? :) In practise,  
point it at any random hCard-enabled page and it returns a pretty  
good set of results. May even be useable for basic applications at  
this point. Knock up a quick profile and it'll probably handle  
vevents too.

Most important of all, I'm licensing it under a LGPL license with the  
hope that others might like to contribute at some point along the  
way. If we have a reasonable set of open tools out there, it really  
lowers the point of entry for others to hack together quick  
applications - as X2V has already proved.

So any quick testing or feedback would be very much appreciated.

drew.