[uf-rest] HTTP headers for Microformats

[Mark Nottingham]

[sorry - got stuck in my outbox]

On 2006/04/09, at 1:44 PM, Ryan King wrote:
>>>
>>> No, its not emphasized, for several reasons:
>>>
>>> 1. We don't have profile URIs for most microformats yet. This is  
>>> mainly because profile URIs have been a low priority thing, since  
>>> microformats pretty much work without them.
>>
>> Were there others?
>
> Are you asking "are there any microformats with profiles?"? If  
> that's the question, then then, yes, xmdp and xfn have profiles, as  
> does hCard (DanC's published a w3.org profile, which we're going to  
> use for now).

No, I was asking if there were other reasons (you only listed one ;)


>> This is a shame; the effort to come up and promote them is very  
>> low. The benefits -- being able to tell whether a document has an  
>> embedded microformat without deep parsing -- seem clear.
>
> The thing with profile uri's is that they can't be treated as  
> reliable. The lack of a profile URI does not guarantee that there  
> is no microformatted data in the document.

Of course; it's always an open world. When it *is* there, though, it  
can significantly help some use cases.


>>> I'm not sure how useful an HTTP-based method would be.  
>>> Invariably, many would not implement it (many don't have that  
>>> freedom in their existing tools), so any consumer wishing to  
>>> consume microformats would be unable to reliably depend on the  
>>> absence of such a header to mean that no microformats are involved.
>>
>> I wouldn't expect many to use it; just having a well-defined  
>> option will help my use cases. Inferring absence of a microformat  
>> from the absence of a header would be bad, and should be  
>> discouraged (as with many other types of metadata, e.g., Link  
>> headers).
>
> You're right here. Is there any prior art of html profile URIs in  
> HTTP headers? That would seem to be the place to start.

Funny you should mention that ;)

I've been toying with the idea of more formally specifying the link  
HTTP header;
   http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/Object_Headers.html#link
and adding the ability to declare the profile in HTTP headers.


Cheers,

--
Mark Nottingham     http://www.mnot.net/

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