[uf-discuss] Microformats in Form Fields

[Scott Reynen]

On Oct 5, 2006, at 5:17 AM, Ciaran McNulty wrote:

> I agree with this.  I think indicating that a form contains an hCard
> is semantically valid in and of itself, especially in the case of
> presenting an hCard in a form for editing.  There's also nothing
> immediately wrong with saying that an empty form is an empty hCard,
> IMO.

An empty hCard is not an hCard.  hCard requires at least a name, and  
most other microformats have some basic requirements.  So I think  
it's bad semantics to say there's an hCard somewhere when there's  
not.  Even in the case where the hCard data is there (a pre-filled  
form), it doesn't follow the current hCard parsing standards, so it's  
only an hCard if we're redefining what hCard is.  And I don't see the  
point of that.  Parsers will need to be rewritten to make use of this  
data regardless of the root class name.  Using the existing root  
class names seems to only ensure that parsers will also need to be  
rewritten if they want to ignore this data.

> Decoupling the semantics that say 'this accepts input' is a very good
> idea.  I'm not actually sure if any new class needs to defined to say
> that though - surely the semantics of FORM/INPUT elements say all of
> that anyhow?

That the form is used for input is obvious.  That the form is used  
for input of hCards is not obvious, and I don't think adding  
class="vcard" makes it obvious.  What was the problem with Drew's  
earlier suggestion of accept="text/html+vcard" to identify the  
accepted microformat input format?

> As you can probably gather from the above, my personal instinct would
> be to expand uFs' parsing rules to explain how to deal with forms.

I see no problem with that, but I still see no benefit in forcing  
that change on all existing parsers by using the old class names to  
mean new things.  Currently class="vcard" means "you can find contact  
data within tags containing vcard property names as classes" and what  
I'm seeing suggested here is changing class="vcard" to mean "you can  
find contact data within tags containing vcard property names as  
classes, or within the value attribute of input tags containing those  
classes, or if those value attributes are blank and you have contact  
data, this would be a good place to paste it."  That strikes me as a  
complicated redefinition of a microformat to suit a hypothetical edge  
case.

Peace,
Scott