[uf-discuss] Enumerating Microformats on a Page

Fri Mar 24 14:20:06 PST 2006

First of all, welcome to the list, Phil. I encourage you to read  
through the list archives and the wiki, there's a lot of background  
material and previous discussion there.

On Mar 24, 2006, at 12:16 PM, Phil Haack wrote:

> 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.

Right, because the current method is to have a seperate URI for each  
microformat.

> 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.

Hmm, this sounds to me like a theoretical argument. I'd like to hear  
what experience people have had here. Has anyone here worked on  
crawling to index microformats? If so, what challenges did you face?

Also, I don't believe microformats are a special case here.  
Discovering HTML resources on the web is a common problem, regardless  
of wether the pages have microformats in them or not.

> 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.

Hmm, what's wrong with using the standard 'Contents' [http:// 
www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#type-links]?

> 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?

Besides Google's sitemaps, I'm sure there's been other work done.  
Anyone have some knowledge here?

-ryan