[uf-discuss] VIA or VIA SELF to indicate authoritative hCard [was: UID URL to indicate (relatively) more authoritativehCard (Was: Vote on this: rel="me self" to indicate anauthoritative hCard)]

[Joe Andrieu]

Scott Reynen wrote:
> On Feb 8, 2007, at 4:29 PM, David Janes wrote:
> 
> >> That the authoritative hCard is the
> >> one that _doesn't_ have a UID, i.e. potentially has less 
> information 
> >> than a fragment hCard?!
> 
> I think this is how authority generally works in practice, from  
> external references.

Scott, 

Actually, I think that's quite contradicted by evidence in the wild,
especially in the offline world.  Birth certificates, passports,
driver's licenses, etc., have indicia asserting their authority.

I had previously voted for rel="self me", but the symmetry of that is
more of a low-security technique to establish mutually endorsed
validity. Interesting, but only partially useful.

I'd like to reintroduce @rel="via" to the conversation[1]:
   5.  The value "via" signifies that the IRI in the value of the href
       attribute identifies a resource that is the source of the
       information provided in the containing element.

Why not just have a "via" point to "source" hCards and any hCard that is
self-referential is  "authoritative"?  That seems both easy for
publishers and relatively straightforward for parsers.  Keep
dereferencing @rel="via" attributes until you find one that dereferences
to itself with @rel="via self".  Once you get to one that says "I'm my
own source," you've got a reasonable assertion of authority.

Ryan Cannon suggested this previously [2], but it seemed to get lost in
"uid url" conversations.

The problem, IMO, with "uid url" is that the uid for a book, for
example, is more likely an ISBN rather than a URL, so it wouldn't
necessarily be a URI.  Allowing both an ISBN uid and a "via" link allows
parsers that aware of ISBN to do smart things (such as link to Amazon if
they wish) /or/ follow the "via" tag for the author's source reference.

Here's the formal def for @rel="self"
   3.  The value "self" signifies that the IRI in the value of the href
       attribute identifies a resource equivalent to the containing
       element.

So, refering hCards use @rel="via" and the authoritative hCard uses
@rel="via self".  And if you don't want to use an <a> link that is
self-referential use a span with class="via self url".

And if the url in the rel is also the aid, the @rel="via uid" and
@rel="via self uid" should work fine.

Seems a good way to bootstrap authority.

-j

[1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287.txt
[2]
http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2007-January/0
08443.html

--
Joe Andrieu
joe at andrieu.net
+1 (805) 705-8651