[uf-discuss] Microformats in Form Fields

Mon Oct 9 07:04:13 PDT 2006

On Oct 5, 2006, at 9:20 AM, Ciaran McNulty wrote:

> I'd prefer to say that an hCard with missing elements *is* an hCard,
> it's just invalid.  It's like saying that a web page that's missing
> its <head> is invalid, rather than saying it's not HTML.

Yeah, after thinking about it more, I don't really think this really  
matters as much as I did before.  Worst case scenario we get a bunch  
of unintentionally partial hCards where half the data gets ignored  
because it's in form inputs.  And partial data is still better than  
no data.  I do, however, still have a concern about this:

>> "or if those value attributes are blank and you have contact
>> data, this would be a good place to paste it."
>
> An existing parser wouldn't at all need to know about this, it would
> need to say, quite rightly, that the hCard wasn't valid and not try
> and do stuff with it.
>
> However, if I was writing a 'smart pasting' application, there's
> already a whole rich semantic structure in hCard that would let me
> immediately work out that, for instance, a certain INPUT[@type="text"]
> is expecing my given-name.

How would an application know whether the following should be parsed  
as a blank additional name, or filled in with a previously supplied  
given name?

<input type="text" class="additional-name" value="" />

Or is there no difference between stating that a property is blank,  
and not stating it at all?

Peace,
Scott