[uf-rest] HTTP headers for Microformats

[Mark Nottingham]

On 2006/03/21, at 3:34 PM, Ryan King wrote:

> 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.

Were there others?

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.

> 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).


> 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.

No. HTTP isn't disallowed from talking about the HTML (or any other  
format) entity in headers; that's what Content-Type and a multitude  
of other headers do.

--
Mark Nottingham
mnot at yahoo-inc.com