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

[David Janes]

On 2/7/07, Ara Pehlivanian <ara.pehlivanian at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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 think you're missing a stage:

- fragment hcard (anywhere on the net by anybody)
- points to home page, using class="url"
- home page, using class="something" rel="something-else", points to
authoritative hcard

e.g. Ryan King hCards in the wild point to http://www.ryanking.com;
http://www.ryanking.com (somehow) points to
http://www.ryanking.com/contact/ which has his authoritative hCard.

At most one back reference is required.

Regard, etc...

-- 
David Janes
Founder, BlogMatrix
http://www.blogmatrix.com
http://blogmatrix.blogmatrix.com