hCard history and extensions (was Re: [uf-discuss] Date of Death in hCard)

[Benjamin West]

On 6/28/07, Andy Mabbett <andy at pigsonthewing.org.uk> wrote:
> In message <C2A93EEF.912A0%tantek at cs.stanford.edu>, Tantek Çelik
> <tantek at cs.stanford.edu> writes
>
> >For some of these I see quite a bit of utility (e.g. "gender" is often
> >used in social network searches - an actual application in common use),
> >whereas others seem to be merely driven by sense of semantic publishing
> >completeness (e.g. date of death) and not by existing applications.
>
> On the contrary; you have been presented with evidence *and* use cases
> for date-of-death more than once; not least in the first post in this
> thread.


Andy, I'm not sure which evidence you are referring to.  All I noticed was a
a sum of google search results.  We've previously discussed using search
engine hits as evidence.  Can you reiterate which URIs were surveyed along
with an analysis of the markup used?  It would go a long way towards providing
evidence for this feature.  How are people currently publishing dates of
death?  Who is doing it? Are there common authorship patterns?

>
> >Finally, any time you find yourself (or anyone else) arguing a positive
> >from the absence of a negative, please call it out as a logical flaw.
> >
> >I.e. statements of the form:
> >
> >"I can see no good reason why ABC
> > should stop XYZ"
> >
> >... do not provide justification for XYZ.
>
> Allow me to correct myself:
>
> The justification for the hCard on that page including his date of death
> (and places of birth and death, for that matter) is not negated by the
> historical, almost accidental, relationship of hCard with vCard.
>

I'm not sure the lack of negation or an objection is a good reason to decide
on property names chosen without evidence.

-Ben