[uf-discuss] Enumerating Microformats on a Page

[Scott Reynen]

On Mar 24, 2006, at 12:17 PM, Phil Haack wrote:

> I can envision something similar with Microformats.  Suppose I  
> point my
> brand spanking new Microformats enabled RSS Bandit towards
> http://glazkov.com/ and it pops up a list of various Microformats  
> on that
> page. Wonderful!
>
> The bummer is that I may miss out on your Down Home Alabama/Russian  
> Fusion
> Cuisine Recipes which just happen to be on another page.  Why deny  
> the world
> a grits and salted herring dish?

Because feed auto-discovery links are in the content, not the headers  
of HTTP responses, aggregators have to download the entire page, and  
most aggregators search first for <link type="alternate" ...> tags,  
and second for something like <a href="something.rss">RSS</a>.  The  
link tag makes more sense here because people don't read feeds  
directly, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to provide human-readable  
<a> links to feeds.  But people *do* read microformat content  
directly, so if it's related to the current page, it should be linked  
from the current page, and any human or machine looking site-wide for  
microformat content (or anything else) should follow links throughout  
the site.

Peace,
Scott