[uf-discuss] My experience creating an hcard 'me card'

[Keith Grennan]

Hi,

I just added hcard to my homepage [1], with a link to convert it to
vcard uing the Technorati contacts service [2].

I did a little test and confirmed that the contacts service follows the
fragment identifier in the URL (#me)- which is awesome because even if I
have multiple hcards on the page, the contacts service will only decode
the 'me card', which is what I wanted.  Yay!

I also wanted to indicate somehow that this card is the authoritative
card for my homepage - the simplest way to do this was to make the url
component of the vcard equal to the homepage url (which is of course
what you'd expect).

After reading a previous related discussion [3], I played with using
rel=self to further indicate that this hcard is authoritative, but by
the definition of rel=self, this usage would only be correct if the url
also contained the fragment pointing to the hcard.  But if I make my
vcard url contain a fragment, then people clicking this link would be
partially scrolled down the page when arriving.  Really, rel=self
indicates more the canonical location of the hcard itself, rather than
the fact that it is authoritative for the page.

Given that, I think that having an hcard contain a url equal to the
homepage URL is good enough - if I just gave someone my homepage URL,
they could deduce which hcard on the page is authoritative for that URL,
because it contains a link to that URL.

However, if I gave someone a link to one of my blog entries, it would be
harder for them to know that this card was authoritative for that entry
- but I don't have as much of a problem with that.

Just thought that I would share this experience - I haven't seen
discussion around indicating that an hcard is authoritative for a
webpage via this simple method, so I thought people might find it
interesting.

My only sticky point now is sharing my photo - the Technorati contacts
service doesn't fetch the hcard photo, and neither does my mac's Address
Book.app.  Fetching the photo and inlining it in the vcard, albeit to
compensate for the limitations of desktop apps, would be a nice feature
for an hcard-to-vcard service.

Cheers,
Keith

[1] http://nearlyfree.org/blog/keith

[2] http://feeds.technorati.com/contacts/http%3A%2F%2Fnearlyfree.org%2Fblog%2Fkeith%23me

[3] http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-issues#Canonical.2FAuthoritative_Hcard