[uf-discuss] Relationship between XFN and hCard

[Dimitri Glazkov]

I've been slowly chipping away at the implementation of XFN builder in
TinyMCE, which is the rich text editor for Wordpress and other
blogging/CMS tools.

Somewhere along the way an odd thought occured -- it seems that XFN
and hCard are closely related. XFN describes relationship of a person,
represented by the target page, and hCard declares that this link is
part of contact information.

I tried to search archives/wiki on the subject and found a couple of
things (http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-examples#hCard_and_XFN, for
instance), but nothing definitive.

As a brainstorming idea, I implemented the XFN builder UI to also be
an implicit hCard builder.  The hCard is created by wrapping a span
around the link. Take a look at this screenshot:

http://flickr.com/photos/dglazkov/146838621/

The default selection is "N/A", which means no XFN/hCard.

If the user selects "Another Web site of mine", an hCard will be built
with an XFN = "me"

If the user selects "Organization", an hCard will be built with no XFN
and "fn org url" class for the link.

If the user selects "Person", the XFN builder is revealed:

http://flickr.com/photos/dglazkov/146834248/

The result of this choice will be an XFN and hCard.

Obviously, in all cases where hCard is created, it's rather barebones,
but somehow I like the fact that the author can explicitly mark a link
as contact information.

What do you guys think? Is this crazy? I remember Drew arguing about
the dangers of implicitly blessing links as hCards
(http://allinthehead.com/retro/287/the-dangers-of-automatically-generating-hcards),
but I can't remember where the discussion ended up.

Thoughts, discussion, critique on the UI are also welcome.

:DG<