[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)]

[Ryan King]

On Feb 8, 2007, at 4:49 PM, Joe Andrieu wrote:
> 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.

As explained previously, rel="me" can't help us here, because it  
applies to the entire page, not a part of a page. That means that it  
can't be used in places like my staff hCard at technorati: http:// 
technorati.com/about/staff.html#ryan_king, because there are many  
hCards on that page.

> 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"?

The simple answer is that we may already have a mechanism in hCard/ 
vCard which is sufficient (ie, UID). We should only look to add  
things if there is nothing already in the format which is sufficient.

>   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.

It appears to me that this is essentially the same algorithm as the  
url+uid proposal, but with adding new terms.

> 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.

I'm not sure how this is relevant. We're talking about hCard here,  
not a citation format.

Also, the url+uid proposal only concerns the case where the url and  
uid are the same (and, therefore, a URL).

-ryan




--
Ryan King
ryan at technorati.com