Vote on this: rel="me self" to indicate an authoritative hCard {was: Re: [uf-discuss] Authoritative hCards [was RE: Canonical hCards (was: Search on CSS element)]}

[Colin Barrett]

On Jan 31, 2007, at 9:47 AM, Ben Ward wrote:

> My understanding therefore, is that @rel=me indicates that it is the  
> same person. @rel=self indicates that it is the same hcard.  
> Therefore the absolute authoritative hcard we speak of may (I expect  
> will) contain other links with @rel=me but will not contain a link  
> with @rel=self.

This is what I understood.

 From here on, is a braindump:

I'm still unsure of the original objection, which seems to be that  
@rel=me must be symmetric. XFN does not have the concept of one of  
those pages being more authoritative than the other, right? If we have  
the following page structure (bare minimum markup included for brevity):

Document A:
<a href="B" rel="me"></a>

Document B:
<a href="A" rel="me"></a>

to XFN, both pages are equally "authoritative," in that they represent  
the same author. XFN doesn't seem to care much about which one is  
"more authoritative" than the other, just that they are referring to  
the same person, and that's fine.

Adding @rel=self is a proposed way of breaking this loop, and letting  
one settle as the authority:

Document A:
<a href="A" rel="me self"></a>

Docment B:
<a href="A" rel="me"></a>

I think that would be the use case (judging by what Chris Messina  
posted)?

The problem there seems that A no longer tells us anything about  
wether or not it recognizes B as another, valid source of information.  
Simply adding another URL with @rel=me doesn't seem like it would work  
though -- then the following case could occur:

Document A:
<a href="A" rel="me self"></a>
<a href="B" rel="me"></a>

Document B:
<a href="B" rel="me self"></a>
<a href="A" rel="me"></a>

In which both A and B claim authority, and both link to each other as  
"slaves", which leaves a parser in a strange situation -- now you  
don't just have two pages claiming to represent one person, but two  
pages claiming to be the authoritative source for one person. This  
doesn't seem like it would make a whole lot of sense.

end braindump.

Is this (one of) the issues being discussed? I'm basing a lot of this  
on Chris Messina's email to the thread, which was a bit unclear.

If so, I wrote a second part to this (attempting to solve that  
problem), but decided to save it until I know wether or not I even  
have my assumptions in order.