[uf-discuss] ignoring minimal hCards

[Martin McEvoy]

Hello Karsten

Karsten Januszewski wrote:
> Hello - I'm finding lots of great sites out there that are using Microformats, hCards and hCalendars, in particular, to maximum effect where there is real value in the data they mark up. (Eventful.com and upcoming.yahoo.com come to mind.) However, I'm seeing other sites where a minimal amount of information is provided (fn, photo, url to page relative to the site).  This data may be of interest from a search index perspective. However, for an application consuming Microformats, it is of less interest.
>
> Consider Twitter: my Twitter profile page has 120 hCards on it (representing everyone who is following me on Twitter), but none of those hCards contain any real interesting data.
>   

I have noticed on many social networking sites such as Twitter, 
Magnolia,  LastFM... etc  use XFN <http://gmpg.org/xfn/> to define which 
hcard's belong to who for example Twitter, Magnolia and LastFM use 
@rel=me to idenifiy the Users profile hcard and @rel=contact to mark up 
the hcards of a users er.. contacts., this pattern is found on a few 
blogs and homepages too.

There is and Demo on how all this information can be put together, you 
may find it useful in your quest take a look at 
<http://weborganics.co.uk/hFoaF/> there is also a wiki page with lots 
more examples of  hcard's supporting user profiles here: 
<http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-xfn-supporting-friends-lists>

Best wishes

Martin McEvoy

> I understand this is a side effect of the fact that only FN is required in hCard.  What are people's thoughts on sites that minimally adopt Microformats?
>
> Right now, I'm working on both a parser and an application. What if my application were to ignore Microformats that may be to spec but weren't interesting enough for my application's purpose? Yes, a subjective decision, but I'm wondering what the community would think of such a decision.
>
> Thanks,
> Karsten
>
>
>
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