[uf-discuss] more hatom rambling - detection

[brian suda]

Having a XMDP URL declare in the head of the document would say for
certain that "in this page, when you come across these values, you can
safely assume they are part of the microformat" without there is not
guarantee that class="vcard" means this is an hCard microformat.

Now, just having an XMDP URL in the profile does not guarantee that
microformats are present, some CMSes add the XFN profile automatically
with or without actual XFN values.

I would say that the profile can be used for "Detection", in the RSS
world you simply add a link element in the head with special rel values.
The browser is not actually following that link and determining that it
is an RSS file, i could serve-up an image... the browser would say that
there is an RSS feed here, then when you suck it into the RSS Reader it
could still fail.

Going solely off of the XMDP Profile values would cause some
false-positives. Short of actually then parsing and checking the output,
THEN saying microformats were found, i'm not sure you can do full-proof
"detection".

There was some discussion about auto-discovery awhile ago on the
wiki[1], that might be a good place to document/update ideas and/or take
this discussion to the Dev-List.

-brian

[1] - http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-brainstorming#Auto-Discovery

Chris Casciano wrote:
>
> Let me continue my hatom spec/issue rambling by piggy backing on the
> recent hcard detection / class "hijacking" thread...
>
> Given [1]:
>
> "the Feed element is optional and, if missing, is assumed to be the page"
>
> What are the rules for detecting that an hatom feed exists in a page?
> Like the other thread, I'm thinking less about the context of actually
> parsing the document with an hatom capable parser, but more in the
> detection context where you may have some other application (browser
> or plugin) detecting that the feed exists and preparing to hand off
> the document to another (feed reading) application.
>
>
> [1] http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom#Feed
>