[uf-discuss] OpenID delegation and XFN

[Tom Morris]

On 10/13/07, Chris Messina <chris.messina at gmail.com> wrote:
> Will Norris made a great suggesting for making OpenID delegation links
> compatible with XFN rel-me links. I actually think that it's okay to
> use <link />'s in the header of a document to point to other social
> networks and so on... I understand that this is not kosher with
> marking up visible data, but if it's going to be there anyway (and
> it's part of the OpenID spec) we might as well markup the links in the
> microformats format:
>
> <link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
> <link rel="openid.delegate me" href="http://will.norris.name/" /
>
> Thoughts on this? I know that I'll get push back, but logically why not this?
>
> <link rel="me" href="http://flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe" />
> <link rel="me" href="http://ma.gnolia.com/people/factoryjoe" />
>

Logically, sure, fine. Practically, one might need to check that
OpenID libraries are
parsing the HTML properly (the XFN tools will be fine, since they are coded with
multiple values in mind) - the programmer may have neglected to look for
space-separated values inside the rel value. I know I'd have to edit
the source of
an OpenID function I wrote a while back.

GrokXFN.xsl (the GRDDL parser for XFN) only looks in 'a' elements for XFN links.
I'm not sure about other parsers (and it's 2am, so I'm not lookin'...)

I think it's a good idea. Visible meta-data is a good idea, but not an absolute
requirement. (Of course, all data is visible - 'View Source'). Putting
microformats
on head/link elements is fine, in my book. The more data, the merrier.

-- 
Tom Morris
http://tommorris.org/