[uf-discuss] hCard SOURCE

[Brian Suda]

On 2/23/07, Scott Reynen <scott at randomchaos.com> wrote:
> No, that's not what I mean.  We stopped talking about "canonical" a
> long time ago.  We're just looking for something *better* than the
> current hCard, and SOURCE seems like a good way to find it, provided
> the SOURCE contains an hCard for the same person, which we can
> indicate with UID.

--- this has managed to span several threads and lots of messages. I
have completely lost track of what people are TRYING to do, what this
actually accomplishes? There is a pretty intereting application that
already does an excellent job of identity consolidation using the
tools we have today.

http://webdd.backnetwork.com/

This is an excellent example for anyone lucky enough to have been at a
conference and played with it. There is some discussion and slides of
how it works[1,2]

> > i am seeing SOURCE as where this hCard/vCard come from so you can
> > trace it back down.  Like a CITE, from where did you extract this data
> > from?
>
> Right.

-- ok, i think i see you point in that each hCard uses SOURCE to say
where they got the information from, but each time you add something
to the chain, the SOURCE is the previous link. 'A' gets the data from
'B' (so A uses B's URL as the SOURCE) 'B' got the data from 'C' (so B
uses C's URL as the SOURCE).

Are people publishing in this way already? We want to model
user-behavior that already exists.

> > THAT is why it is not controled by the user, but instead gleaned
> > from where the hCard was extracted.
>
> Huh?  As a user, I use <cite> all the time.  Why can't I tell you
> where I got some hCard information from in the same way?

--- If we are citing where we got the data from, and each link my
previous example is citing (SOURCEing) where it got the data from,
then the X2V implementation does just this. When it extracts a vCard
from an hCard it uses the URL of the current page as the SOURCE, even
if that hCard used SOURCE and pointed at a different URL. I'm not (and
i don't think you are) advocating following that chain to the end and
using that hCard. We don't do this with the include-pattern for
vairous reasons.

You could add <a href="/foobar/contact" class="url source"> but it
would not get picked-up by extracting applications - only specialized
applications that WANT to follow that chain to the end. Which (IMHO)
is not needed, we already have an application, The backnetwork, that
does all of this without the need of UID or SOURCE or any other
mark-up.

I think we agree on some things and are missing each other on other
points, hopefully we can clear this up.

-brian


[1] - http://www.glennjones.net/Post/825/DestroyingWalledGardens-MicroformatssyndicationandAPI's.htm
[2] - http://www.glennjones.net/downloads/DestroyingWallGardens.pdf

-- 
brian suda
http://suda.co.uk