[uf-discuss] Enumerating Microformats on a Page

Fri Mar 24 12:16:52 PST 2006

People do read Microformat content directly which I understand.  It fits
with the "Human First" principle.

But references to the xmdp profiles are in the <head> element which is NOT
human readable.  So there is precedent for non-human readable
discoverability mechanism within Microformats.

At Mix06, Tantek pointed out that listing all the xmdp profiles that a site
used on a homepage could get unwieldy.  

I suppose if I wanted to help both people and an aggregator find various
Microformats of interest, there could be a microformat for a site index.  My
homepage could include it or simply link to it using some other microformat.

Thus for the human, there would be a simple link to follow <a
href="/siteindex/" rel="siteindex">Site Map</a>.  Likewise, my aggregator
would look for this if it didn't find the xmdp profile for a sitemap on the
current page.  

I think this might be useful so aggregators (and users) don't have to crawl
an entire site.

Has there been any work done in this area? Is it a bad idea?

-----Original Message-----
From: microformats-discuss-bounces at microformats.org
[mailto:microformats-discuss-bounces at microformats.org] On Behalf Of Scott
Reynen
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2006 11:50 AM
To: Microformats Discuss
Subject: Re: [uf-discuss] Enumerating Microformats on a Page

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