[uf-discuss] Authenticity of Authoritative hCard (was: Re: Vote on this: rel="me self" to indicate an authoritative hCard)

[Ben Ward]

On 31 Jan 2007, at 14:49, Ara Pehlivanian wrote:
> Just to stir the pot a little, and maybe it's a good idea to consider
> authenticity in the whole discussion of authoritative cards. What
> guarantees that when someone creates an hCard and puts rel="me self"
> that they are giving the correct URL and that it isn't someone
> impersonating you?

The authoritative version of the hCard is only going to be relative  
to the published hCard itself. The situation doesn't change. Someone  
could already write an inaccurate hCard for me on their website. They  
could write a more thorough version and link from one to the other  
with rel="me self".  This addition doesn't affect the authenticity.

Authenticity falls out of scope of hCard alone. Layer in some OpenID  
and you can have start to imply some authenticity. (e.g. Parse an  
hCard at the OpenID url and follow rel="me self" to another domain.)

If you mean, someone at ‘BenWardSmellsAwful.com’ (don't register  
that, please) writing an hCard and linking to ben-ward.co.uk/about  
with rel="self me", the relationship is such that the Fake Ben's  
hcard is discarded in favour of my real one. This does not allow  
someone to describe ‘this hCard here is the authoritative version of  
that one over there’. The direction of parsing disallows fakes.

Ben