[uf-discuss] Vote on this: rel="me self" to indicate an authoritative hCard

[Ara Pehlivanian]

On 2/7/07, Ryan King <ryan at technorati.com> wrote:
> You're right, rel=me requires symmetry in order to be trusted at all.
> For this reason, and others XFN is not the simplest way to do
> Authoritative hCards.

I guess the real question is, "who will be creating the partial hCards
that will be referring to the authoritative hCard?" If the answer is,
"the owner of the authoritative hCard" then the scenario is manageable
and the owner can update the authoritative hCard at their leisure to
reflect the partial ones created. However, if the answer is, "anyone"
then the spec is impossible to support because the author of the
authoritative hCard has absolutely no way of tracking all of the
partial cards referring to the authoritative one. A prime example is
if you're a speaker at a conf. and the organizers put together a
simple hCard with your name in it and point to your authoritative
hCard. Worse still, if a phone directory site marks up their results
with hCard, how would you ever know to link to it? Which page would
you link to (as results tend to have multiple views).

The worst part of either scenario is the idea that your authoritative
hCard will keep growing with all this unsightly references to lesser
cards. It's a maintenance and aesthetic nightmare.

I say we should find a better way of doing this.

A.