[uf-discuss] Apple adds support for hcard in dotmac webmail

[Chris Messina]

It might, yes...

Put it this way: there's a convergence coming between OpenID,
microformats (especially XFN and hcard) and being able to specify
assertions about a given hcard without having all information, in my
thinking, is valuable.

Now, I know there was the recent discussion about visible vs invisible
microformats, but if you only have a name visible, it's nice to be
able to specify where the authoritative data should come from.

In the case of the Apple webmail address book, consider this use case:

1. assume an hcard on a page in the webmail address book
2. assume that there's at least a name (fn)
3. assume that there's a url included in that hcard; also assume that
said URL is an OpenID identifier

Now, whenever you call up that hcard throughout the system (for
example, in the To: autocomplete field), the added div would have the
same ID (or class?). This would enable the system to look up the
authoritative information and update it if a conflict exists. Clearly,
Apple uses a hash that corresponds to your local Address Book.app's
internal file storage to create the IDs (I presume), but using a
dash-url would probably suffice if your filesystem were made up of
webpages.

Anyway, we've discussed the matter of authoritative hcards and GUIDs
for people before -- Apple's gone ahead and created a system that
actually implements one model for this problem.

I think this gives us an opportunity to look at how identity/auth
systems start to interact with data storage services.

Thoughts?

Chris


On 10/29/06, Ben Ward <lists at ben-ward.co.uk> wrote:
>
> On 29 Oct 2006, at 21:45, Chris Messina wrote:
>
> > if only URLs could be turned into IDs:
>
> Not sure what your intention would be Chris, but there's a fairly
> well established practice of converting 'http://microformats.org/
> something.html to the form 'microformats-org-something-html' for page-
> unique BODY element IDs. Would that suffice?
>
> Ben
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss at microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
>


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