[uf-discuss] XFN for email addresses?

[Ryan King]

On Jun 15, 2007, at 12:19 AM, Pelle W wrote:

> The two concerns that I can come up with is that if one site wants  
> an e-mail adress for their xfn-links and another wants an url then  
> I all of the sudden have to identities without connection between  
> them. The solution to that would be the ability to specify both e- 
> mail and url for the same person - could this perhaps be done with  
> an hCard?
>
> The other concern is that an e-mail often has to be written with  
> some kind of a spam-protection - how does that relate to having it  
> as an identification string? I often write foo(SNABEL-A)bar(PUNKT) 
> se when I write mails on my site and then I parse them with  
> JavaScript so that it becomes a real adress in the end - this  
> should protect me from non javascript enabled spambots. The  
> question then is - what mail should xfn "see" - the parsed or the  
> non-parsed? And what if one of my friends adds me and chooses a  
> different spamprotection?
>
> The easy solution would be to have a personal unified spamprotected  
> mail - but then no one else than persons can mail them, not even  
> the sites which I may register my e-mail to. What if say Last.fm  
> for example would like to implement this XFN on their users friends  
> list. They need to protect their users' emails but they haven't had  
> their users specify their own spamprotection. Should they then  
> demand a personal spamprotection from each user? Should they skip  
> it or choose on of their own?
>
> The only real solution would be to adopt a personal spamprotected  
> mail in addition to the real mail for each user - right? And then  
> that string could be almost anything that uniquely identifies the  
> user - their phone number, their pets name, a public encryption key  
> etc.

Spam fighting is out of scope for XFN and microformats in general.

-ryan