[uf-discuss] Authoritative hCards [was RE: Canonical hCards (was: Search on CSS element)]

[Ben Ward]

On 24 Jan 2007, at 14:51, Ara Pehlivanian wrote:
> Just a shot in the dark here, but couldn't the <a class="url" ...> be
> assumed to be pointing to the hCard owner's site where it could be
> further assumed that the authoritative hCard would reside? What's
> more, if the href in the <a class="url"...> contained an id for the
> actual hCard in question then you'd be pointing directly to the
> correct hCard (in case the page contains multiple ones, for
> work/home/etc...)
>
> An example would be: <a class="url"
> href="http://mydomain.com/contact.html#myInfo"...>

Whilst the use of fragment URLs is definitely correct as regards  
focusing on specific hCards on a page, you cannot imply authority  
based just on class=url — it's valid and legal that an hCard can have  
multiple URLs, so which would be authoritative?. On my own site, I  
link to my /about page, my Flickr account, Delicious bookmarks and so  
on, all with class="url" and rel="me".

For my money, John Allsopp's idea to reuse rel="bookmark self" [1]  
makes most sense. As well as being gorgeously consistent with other  
existing microformats, it's also a completely graceful addition to  
existing hCards.

The only concern I can see to check is if this would conflict with  
and break the parsing of hAtom/hReview that already use those rel  
values in combination?

It would take the guesswork out of parsing, whilst publishing useful  
information. Additionally, what do people think to situations where  
an hCard contains a A/@REL="bookmark self" but not @class=url? The  
use case being when I don't regard my /about page as being a relevant  
URL for inclusion in my hCard parsing, but do wish to have it  
followed and parsed as the authoritative version.

Ben

[1]: http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2007- 
January/008309.html