[uf-rest] HTTP headers for Microformats

[Ryan King]

On Mar 21, 2006, at 1:25 PM, Mark Nottingham wrote:

> The profile attribute is probably the least desirable yet still  
> viable option -- *if* people use it. Is there any data / anecdotal  
> evidence of how often it's used? Just browsing through the  
> individual uF specs, it doesn't seem to be emphasised too much.

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.

> Much more preferable would be a HTTP header. As I said,  
> intermediaries don't like to dive into the content -- they're  
> handling thousands to tens of thousands of requests a second, and  
> they don't want to touch anything beyond the headers if they can  
> possibly help it.
>
> I was thinking of something that duplicated the information in the  
> body, much as the link tag does; e.g.,
>   Link: <http://www.example.com/myProfile>; rel="xmdp-profile"
> or maybe a new header (since the profile attribute isn't isomorphic  
> with a link tag);
>   HTML-Profile: "http://www.example.com"
>
> That way, it wouldn't be required, but it would be at least  
> possible to express this information in a more friendly way.

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.

Plus, pushing this down to http seems to be a violation of  
'separation of concerns'. HTML works, no matter what protocol is used  
to move it around, microformats shouldn't break that.

-ryan
--
Ryan King
ryan at technorati.com