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

[Chris Messina]

Well, I certainly am coming to the party late.

I actually started a post on this topic over a week ago -- and
absentmindedly hadn't checked on this list first before posting and
therefore published without the benefit of this discussion (I can hear
Tantek chiding me) but nonetheless, as the first half of a two-part
piece of transcending social networks (I have to write up the second
half still) I wrote this:

Scoping XFN and identifying authoritative hcards
<http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2007/01/29/scoping-xfn-and-identifying-definitive-hcards/>

I pretty much came up with a very similar proposal for handling this
issue, though from the standpoint of XFN-links, and I think that
John's suggestion is very good, though instead of using "bookmark
self" might suggest "me self" for identifying the One True Hcard:

<div class="vcard" id="vcard">
  <address><a href="http://factoryjoe.com/blog/hcard/#hcard" class="fn
url" rel="me self">Chris Messina</a></address>
  <div class="org">Citizen Agency</a>
  ...
</div>

That way, any hcard that links to me at
http://factoryjoe.com/blog/hcard/#hcard will find a self-referencing
hcard which serves as the proverbial "end of the road". I prefer "self
me" because of the potential conflict of embedding this kind of hcard
in other formats, as has been suggested could be an issue...

The use of the <address> tag is also important, as it signifies with
additional certainty that the author of the page own the hcards --
making it doubly authoritative.

Thus if you can find an object at "address a[rel~=self].url", there's
good chance you've got something pretty solid.

Thoughts? (I've also updated my post to reflect John's suggestion)

Chris

On 1/29/07, John Allsopp <john at westciv.com> wrote:
> Ben,
>
> > 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.
>
> thanks ;-)
>
> There's a lot of goodness to reuse from other ufs, for sure.
>
> > 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?
>
> When rel-license is inside an hReview, it is taken to be associated
> with the review,  rather than the larger fragment it would otherwise
> be associated with (e.g. post or page)
>
> I wonder whether that makes sense more generally - things apply at
> the finest level of granularity at which it mkes sense - so
> rel="bookmark self" applies to the microformatted content it is most
> directly descended from.
> Are there reasons people think this is a bad idea?
> An analogy again is categories in hAtom
>
> You can have either feed categories or entry categories. Both are
> encoded using rel-tag. The difference is that entry categories are
> inside the hentry element, while feed categories are in the hFeed
> element (but not in the hEntry element). The point is that hEntry
> elements descend from hFeed elements, so all entry categories are
> inside an hFeed element.
>
> Indeed, Brian Suda, Michael Kaply, or someone else who does a bit of
> parsing might weigh in on whether or not this is an implicit
> assumption they make more generally with their parsers, or whether it
> might become an explicit convention - to try and formulate it (badly)
>
> "where a feature of microformats may apply to more than one element
> in a descendent tree, it is associated with the element which most
> directly contains it ."
>
> > 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.
>
> Not sure whether this is straying into the 20% part of the problem
> space? Just my initial response, with little real thought ;-)
>
> john
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>


-- 
Chris Messina
Citizen Provocateur &
  Open Source Ambassador-at-Large
Work: http://citizenagency.com
Blog: http://factoryjoe.com/blog
Cell: 412 225-1051
Skype: factoryjoe
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