[uf-discuss] Best practice for the "value" subproperty

[David Osolkowski]

On 11/2/06, Costello, Roger L. <costello at mitre.org> wrote:
> A thought occurred to me with regards to the Design #3 approach.  Can I
> add information that didn't exist in the original HTML text?
>
> Suppose that this is the original HTML text:
>
>      John will be our speaker.  Mr. Public will talk about ...
>
> And here is how I mark it up (using Design #3):
>
> <abbr class="fn" title="Mr. John Q. Public, Esq.">John</abbr>
> will be our speaker.  Mr. Public will talk about ...
>
> Notice that I added information that was not in the original HTML text,
> namely, his middle initial and his suffix.

Unfortunately, I don't think this is valid.  The real required field
is n (name), but hCard uses something called "implied n optimization"
[1] to derive n from fn (formatted name) if only fn is given.  This
simplifies the common case of "given-name family-name".  However, this
only works if fn is fairly simple.  If you want to include prefixes,
middle initials, suffixes, etc. then you have to fully specify the n
construct yourself.

- David

[1] http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard#Implied_.22n.22_Optimization