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

[Brian Suda]

On 5/10/07, Keith Grennan <keith at nearlyfree.org> wrote:
> 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.

--- this is where the rel="me" can help to consolidate identity.[1]

> 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.

This is correct, this is a limitation of desktop apps they do not
derefference the URL to find the image. There is away around this by
using the DATA URI to encode, but there are drawbacks because IE7
doesn't support the DATA URI.[2]

I have been experimenting with the DATA URI and CSS on my own site:
http://suda.co.uk/contact/

the resulting hcard has the PHOTO base64 encoded
http://feeds.technorati.com/contact/http://suda.co.uk/contact

PHOTO;ENCODING=b;TYPE=png:iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAADIAAAAyCAMAAAA......

To hide the image from IE6/7 i am using the not() operator which is
not suported to show it to advanced browsers which also support the
DATA URI.

#gravatar img.photo { display:none }
#gravatar>img.photo:not([border]) { display:block }

I hope this helps.
-brian

[1] - http://www.gmpg.org/xfn/and/
[2] - http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-parsing

-- 
brian suda
http://suda.co.uk