[uf-discuss] Twitter implementation issues

[David Janes]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 10:56 AM, Glenn Jones <glenn.jones at madgex.com> wrote:
> The guys at Twitter have done a great job of adding microformats to
> their site. Like everyone else in the developer world I love building
> twitter mash-ups, (the new hello world) but I like to use microformats
> as my API. Unfortunately there are one or two small issue with the
> Twitter implementation. So I have fired off a email to their support,
> but have no heard back yet. I thought I may be able to reach them
> through the list. May be you work for Twitter and known the right person
> to forward this to.
>
> Below I documented some problems and made some suggestions on how they
> could be easily fixed. They are just suggestions.
>
> I already have a couple of Twitter integrations demo's for this year's
> SXSWi Microformats panel, I would love to increase what I could show.
>
> Thanks
>
> Glenn Jones
>
>
>
> Implementation issues:
>
> On the status pages ie http://twitter.com/glennjones. There are a couple
> of things that are stopping the status hEntry on twitter from parsing
> correctly. Also there are a number issues with the hCard which
> represents the user on the page.
>
>
> A)
> The first is that the status text is wrapped in "entry-content" class,
> but there is no "entry-title". Unfortunately the "entry-title" is
> mandatory where "entry-content" is not. This is why the Firefox plug-in
> Operator is saying that entries mark-up is invalid.
>
> Incorrect:
>    <span class="entry-content">Weekend procrastination starts
> here.</span>
>
> So you could change the element holding the text to have a class of
>    <span class="entry-title">Weekend procrastination starts
> here.</span>
>
> Or use both classes on the element
>    <span class="entry-content entry-title ">Weekend procrastination
> starts here.</span>
>
>
>
>
> B)
> Secondly the "updated" property is required where as "published" is not,
> for completeness I would suggest using both. Most if not all
> Microformats parsers will only take the ISO date information from a
> title attribute of an abbr tag. So if you recode the element as follows
> we should be able to parse the date correctly.
>
> Incorrect:
>      <span class="published" title="2009-01-31T13:55:33+00:00">17
> minutes ago</span>
>
> to
>      <abbr class="published updated"
> title="2009-01-31T13:55:33+00:00">17 minutes ago</abbr>
>

Excellent suggestions. However, for point (B) this is not necessary as
if published is present and updated is not, updated is assumed to be
the same as published [1]

Regards, etc...

[1] http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom#Entry_Updated

-- 
David Janes
Mercenary Programmer
http://code.davidjanes.com